Crossing Lines
by Wakong
Summary: Cameron and Derek have found their way back home. The pawns begin to move in John Connor's big chess game. Coming up, last installment: Cameron's Heart.
1. Part One, Chapter One

**Author's note****: **I do not own the characters, the space-time continuum, etc. Main characters: Cameron, John, Derek and Sarah. And a bunch I will not divulge, here.

**Summary: **The story is set six years after the events of Today is the Day (part two) and so we jump over the fate of Derek, Cameron and John. Sarah ditched Derek and Cameron, hiding John in the lighthouse with Charlie Dixon. She felt that Jesse's treason was Derek's, and that Riley's murder was an omen. An omen from _their _kind, an omen from Cameron's true nature. The four of them never reunited and six years have passed since 2008. A storm gathers, and in the eye of the storm stands a girl from the future, Cameron. Space and time have been stretched between her and John. She will travel with unexpected companions on an unexpected journey to find her way back. Heads and arms will be severed, Derek will wear Hawaiian shirts and the strands of time will be woven and unwoven.

* * *

**CROSSING LINES**

**PART ONE**

**THE FOUR CORNERS**

* * *

**CHAPTER ONE **

**IN WHICH A STORM GATHERS**

**AND DEREK MEETS A BLOND GIRL**

* * *

The night had grown hot and sultry in the northern state of Washington. Black clouds had gathered from the shoreline, their insides cracked open by towering arcs of lightning. Each bolt of blinding light would leave a vaporous, two-dimensional imprint of the world on his retinas: the tenements looked carved out of limestone and the cars lined up the curb were so many paintings of ancient predators.

Derek had spent the last three years earning a decent wage bouncing for late night establishments near Seattle. The three years before that, he was in prison. Sarah had just hightailed with John, leaving him marooned down a dirt road with a truckload of rifles and a set of sham coordinates to the safe house. He had yearned for a strong drink that night and got more than one. He'd been caught sobering up on the sticky floorboards of a backcountry joint where he'd broken some kneecaps… _just an honest brawl between honest folks, really_. Somehow, the prosecutor had been at odds with this statement and he thought – in his right mind – that throwing a customer into a red-hot frying table was far from the realm of _honest_ behaviors. But it had smelt like burnt pork, and Derek loved the smell of burnt pork, it would always bring him back to the family barbecues on Sundays. Derek said so and they said he should not be joking on such _grave_ matters and the honest brawl turned into an "aggravated assault and battery" – which you could call a terminological divergence, in Derek's opinion.

He made a turn right on the wet, neon-spattered street. The asphalt had been battered by the heavy summer rain and rivulets were gushing down the gutters. He steered his old truck into the half-empty parking lot: the wet tarmac was lit by a lone sodium-vapor lamp. He keyed off the ignition and shouldered the door open, slamming it shut behind him. The air was heavy with salt and the tang of ozone and thunder was rumbling low on the horizon. Derek strolled to the back entrance of the King Jack's nightclub where Omar, the lean, six-eight bouncer had his usual don't-fuck-with-me look, his black shirt and black skin still damp from the rain; he hauled himself up from the garden chair and smiled a wide array of tobacco-stained teeth.

"Didn't reckon I'd see you before Monday," he said. Omar bent himself and they patted each other on the back.

Derek wiped the moisture from his brow. "Yeah, just figured I'd spent the night down here, cooling off."

"I here ya." Omar produced a set of keys from his pocket, unlocked and pushed open the metal gate that advertised in flaky letters:

STAFF ONLY

"Don't go too hard on yourself, old man!" he called out when Derek vanished into the gloomy staircase; he chuckled and raised his middle finger above his shoulder.

Thunder roared one last time before the door was closed and Derek felt like a big cat. Knowing the man – and his history with violence – you might picture this kind of _big cat_: the huge, yellow-eyed shadow pouncing from the depths of the canopy in a rustle of leaves and a hail of fangs. But in that regard, you couldn't be further from the truth. Derek felt like an overweight Persian dragging its furry paunch over the parquet and under the bed, scared to the bones by the looming storm. It would always drag him back to _that _place where daylight had became an obsolete concept, the everlasting darkness split apart by serpentine bolts of lightning and acid rains and the heat rising from the vitrified, tainted soil. Storms still gave him the heebie-jeebies, and no mistake. If you were to mention it, though, violence would certainly ensue.

Derek took the flight of skidproof steps that led to a thirty-foot long maintenance hallway where aluminum-coated pipes sprouted at random from the polystyrene ceiling. The rumble of thunder overhead faded slowly, washed away by the bone-shaking thrum emanating from the nightclub's backroom. Derek let the tension in his spine wear off. He didn't care much for the music or the scantily-clad chicks that usually crowded the place, but he was keen on spending most of the night underground, nursing a shameful amount of sixty-percent-off White Russians – the perks of being a bouncer. He came to an halt at the end of the deserted hallway and softly pushed the nondescript plywood door open and the world became noise and flickering lights.

He found his regular reddish, vinyl-layered booth in the most secluded part of the smoky basement, somewhat recluse from the faceless crowd moving in sync to a dull, mechanical beat. Darkness was only split by transient speckles of blue, pink and green light, staining the varnished surface of his table to the Brownian rhythm of swiveling spotlights. He made a vague two-finger gesture toward the counter and Louis, the heavily-tattooed barkeep, nodded his acknowledgment before deftly taking various flasks and bottles from the neon-embedded bar. The faded-blue ink he wore from wrist to shoulder displayed linear bits of metal, servos, hinges and pistons. Somehow, the sight of it could unsettle Derek: it was an oblivious, mock-painting of what laid underneath the skin of _them_. His paranoid self would still creep up at the faintest cue: a glimpse of metal or a vacant stare, all too reminiscent of the rubber-skinned monsters… one night, he shot his VCR recorder into Bakelite smithereens. It was the red diode, he had told himself, panting in the pistol smoke. _It was the_ _freaking __red diode, all right_.

"You buying?"

Derek had not noticed the pretty blond that had taken a seat opposite to him, her legs swung together in a strange poise, as if she were side-saddling a still, wooden horse. He was met with straight, shoulder-length ash blond hair and the outline of a delicate neck and the delicate tendons within. She seemed engrossed in the hot, boiling human soup stirring back and forth on the dancing floor. New patrons were still gushing through the main entrance. A couple of them, tall blokes with craggy faces, made a beeline to the bar. Then the blond girl lost whatever had caught her eye in the inebriated crowd and turned back to Derek. Smudges of light flew across her face, cracking open the surrounding darkness for a split second. She was a bit younger than he was but he could not decide if she was beautiful. She was a dissonant sight, though, clad in different shades of black head to toe, from the worn leather jacket and the black tank top underneath to the tight, battered jeans. She wore big, golden hoop earrings.

"I'm having White Russians," said Derek over the loud music. He frowned: the sentence seemed to lack a relevant amount of syllables. _Heck_, his tongue was thick. "It's coffee liquor, milk and vodka," he explained. "You having some?"

She blinked and nodded in what surely meant agreement and Derek raised two fingers toward the counter.

"You come here often?" she asked. It sounded more like a statement.

"I bounce, here."

She made a quiet sound that resembled a question mark – if you admitted that question marks could make a sound of their own.

Derek went on, "I handle security at the entrance, spook off the tipsy, flip-flop wearing folks. We don't want no flip-flops, here, broken glass can be deadly to toes. They said they wanted to switch the tumblers with plastic cups, but it's not the same _cachet_, you know. Anyway, it's my night off." He did not mention that elbows had been bent at unnatural angles on more than one occasion. Most of the work was smooth-talk, anyway.

"Oh," she said. "Thank you for explaining."

He didn't quite catch that.

The waitress, a cute brunette in her mid-twenties, came in carrying a large, black tray balanced on her palm. She leaned over the table, shrouded in the ambient blackness, and set down two large copper tumblers filled to the brim with a creamy liquid, a few coffee beans floating on the foamy surface. She parted quietly and sashayed to the next secluded booth.

The blond girl took a small, pink-tongued sip out of the tumbler then gazed at it as if it might lick her back in retribution. She said something that sounded like "cheers" and Derek returned the courtesy absentmindedly – he didn't raise his tumbler, though. He was staring past her left shoulder, watching intently as the waitress stopped in front of the nearest booth, twenty feet shy from theirs. The two rough-looking guys that had entered the club a few minutes ago sat there, facing each other. One had porcine eyes burrowed in a pale face, his jaws clenched, the other was broad-shouldered with short-cropped hair, his skin the color of oiled mahogany. They both wore close-fitted field jackets made of a gray, heavy-duty fabric. They looked blank and did not share a single word when the waitress handed them two highball glasses of tonic water. Derek looked away when the white guy caught his eye.

The scene – Derek decided in his inner, _not-paranoid _mind – was deeply unnerving. He felt a hollowness spread in his guts, the one he'd trusted his whole life to keep him safe and _get him the hell out of Dodge_. He pressed harder against the backrest and shifted in his seat to feel the reassuring weight of the Glock strapped under his parrot-ornamented shirt. The blond girl said something but it sounded like a distant hum, now. The sweaty crowd was swaying with frenzy, taking individual human shapes under the fleeting waves of light only to vanish a second later… the bass beat was speeding up frantically, merging into a lifeless shriek.

Then it all came down in a heartbeat.

The booming speakers went dead and the basement was plunged into utter darkness. The world became noise again to the deafening crack of thunder and disembodied cries of fear.

* * *

John Connor pinched the bridge of his nose and knocked back the cold remnants of coffee that laid at the bottom of his "Best Dad Ever!" ceramic mug. He pressed the "Y" key when the terminal prompted him with an umpteenth request. Monitoring the local precincts' database had been a bust. Then he'd gone from reading forecast bulletins to rummaging through thousands of obscure webpages, searching for weird, "bubble-looking" electromagnetic events. The amount of "bubble-looking" stuff the search engine could muster was maddening. _Truly maddening_.

"Care for help?" came the sweet voice from the doorway. John didn't bother to greet the newcomer. He took his forehead and temples in his hands and let out a gruff "_m'fine_."

Savannah made her way to the desk littered with a solid ton of laptops, hard-drives and monitors, each one of them displaying fluctuating graphics or black-and-white security recordings. She laid a thin, freckled hand on John's shoulder. The girl had hit puberty the year before and she'd nursed a crush on and off for the young man since. She knew from the slight shake in his hands that he had not slept a single minute in the past twenty-four hours.

"I know it's out there," said John. His voice trailed off a bit. "It's coming, I can feel it."

Savannah picked up a printed copy of a scientific article precariously perched up a towering pile of paper. John had tried to wrap his head around this for more than a week, now. Something about _time slippage_. She could not understand one word out of two but she knew it had something to do with the upcoming storm. Clocks were not ticking the way they should be.

"A second is an arbitrary measure," had said John to her over breakfast, the bottom-half of his face hidden behind the Honey Pops box. "It's based on the state transition of cesium."

"What's cesium?"

"It's an atom. Anyway, the nuclear clocks are getting out of tune. Time is slipping. It's like a _real_ Doomsday Clock."

Savannah doubted such a clock existed. Most of the concepts were way out of her grasp but one thing was for certain: she trusted John. Clocks were getting funky and it had something to do with time travels.

"It's like the leaves on a tree," he had said. "They move because of the wind, but you cannot see the wind itself, right? Well, traveling in time is like the wind, the tree is the watch on your wrist and the ticking hands are the leaves. When they miss a tick, it means that someone, or _something_, has jumped back in time."

She had nodded in sham understanding before gulping down a mouthful of cereal.

"I think it's about matter," he had mused over his third cup of coffee. "The amount of energy displaced by a body is high enough that the universe needs to balance it, y'know, blow off the steam. Somehow, losing time is one way of doing it… come on, sweetie, finish your Honey Pops. You gonna be late for school."

Savannah put back the paper neatly on the edge of the wooden desk. Dusk had finally settled on their quiet suburb. It was a hot night, though, and the amount of computers radiating heat was gradually turning the room into a furnace.

"Maybe I'm going to call it a night," said John, slouching back into the padded chair to stare blankly at the monitors.

"I wish I could help."

He sighed and swiveled on the chair. "Don't sweat it, lil'one. You should get some sleep, too."

John's desk was actually a downscale version of the entire room. Heaps of garments and dismantled weapons were battling for supremacy over the parquet floor. The bed had been already claimed by thirty meters of copper wire, a small army of pliers with handles spanning the whole color spectrum and a dozen solid-state circuits ablated from gutted computers.

Something caught Savannah's eye on the edge of the desk. Something she hadn't seen in a long time. She bit the inside of her mouth. "Would she be able to help?" she finally asked.

John rubbed his eyes harshly. "_Huh_?"

She was pointing at something resting at the far end of the desk. A tiny set of navy-blue folded paper. She knew that sometimes John would look into it with solemn deference, engrossed in the tiny picture within. Sometimes, though, he would hide it for months in the top drawer of his bedside table, trying to forget it even existed in the first place. Savannah couldn't help but feel a pang of envy. She walked past John, took the passport and stared at the portrait inside.

"Would she be able to help?" she said again.

John tensed up, he never talked about her willingly and would get skittish if someone did. Savannah had never met the woman on the photograph – the only one they'd kept – and would eagerly snatch every piece of information, every bit of memory she'd left behind her.

"I don't know," he sighed wearily. "She knew a lot. At the same time, she knew very little."

Savannah fiddled with one corner of the passport. "She still alive?" she asked.

John gently took it back from her hands and closed it without looking at the picture inside. "It doesn't matter. Now, let's get some rest –"

John's voice disappeared in the deafening sound that engulfed the house and Savannah yelped in fear. Thunder rolled up ahead, the unreal crack of a mountain being split open by the sheer force of nature. They stood still in the white dust slowly drifting down the plaster ceiling. Savannah had a firm grip on John's arm. Her eyes and ears were slowly regaining function, adjusting to the darkness and the sharp silence. The lights in the house had went out, save for John's hardware, plugged to an emergency generator. Outside, some streetlamps had shattered from the surge.

John was unflinching, smiling even in the blue glow cast by the monitors.

"What was that?" cried Savannah.

"Gotcha!" exulted John, ignoring her. He pointed to one of the screens where charts were furiously blanking amber. Once again, the universal timescale had shifted. No human could have perceived such a feeble mishap in in the space-time continuum, but a machine could.

"The power surge is huge, too" he said, spinning another monitor around. "Look! It's spread a hundred miles inland."

John was ecstatic, tapping away at high speed on the plastic keyboard. One at a time, lights were back in the street, materializing out of the ozone-tinted mist. "Someone jumped," he said. "One hell of a jump, too, it fried half the west coast. I gotta track back the position –"

She interrupted his ramble, "John, look!"

A grayscale footage was playing on one of the screens, the one that was paired to the LAPD private broadcast. Shaky pictures interwove with statics. The body-worn camera shuddered to the fast pace of the policeman as he ran and turned sharply into a back alley. The scene came into focus when the cop stopped abruptly in his tracks. The street was _literally _on fire, metal was dripping from the melting staircase attached to the brick walls. Impenetrable smoke was rising from the center of the alley, evaporating slowly, first revealing the black-burnt, vitrified tarmac, then the naked body kneeling at the center of the crater.

John's mouth was agape. "_Fuck_."

A large human shape emerged from the fuming embers, the surrounding fire casting deep shadows on his muscular body. He did not seem to mind the white-hot asphalt as he marched forward. The cop's voice came crackling on John's desk, "_You alright, bud? Just step out of this mess._"

The other responded, "_What day is it?_"

"_Huh. Saturday._"

"_What year?_"

"_You got hit by lightning or something, bud? 2014. Come ahead, now._"

"_Thank you for the information._"

John and Savannah watched the cop being lifted up from the ground. He drew his pistol and shot. The naked man did not even flinch when the bullet ripped and tore his skin apart, revealing the metal under his jaw. They heard a heart-sickening snap and the cop went limp. The last thing they saw was the ground on fire and a bare foot stepping on the camera, and then, the back alley turned into white noise.

* * *

Derek sprang upward and thumbed the safety off his Glock, adrenaline searing his thigh muscles. Bodiless cries of fear drifted through absolute blackness. His body quivered and tensed when something came laying upon the center of his chest. He snapped and grabbed what felt like a hand. He tried to yank it away, but the arm attached to it was like unmovable, solid steel.

The distant drone of a generator revved softly and the emergency sodium-lamps came alive, casting a weak, yellow glow down the smoky basement of the King Jack's nightclub. A man climbed up the counter and shouted to the top of his lungs over the noisy crowd, "Sorry guys! We experienced some kind of – _huh –_ power surge. The second generator has just kicked in. We gonna wait for the main power to turn back on."

Derek stood still, deaf to his surroundings; the world had coalesced into a blur… all but the tiny, smooth hand that held is Hawaiian shirt into a death-grip, and the lean, leather-clad arm above. The blond girl was standing upright, her petite frame inches away from his bulky one. Her face showed nothing, not even the slightest strain while she was holding his two hundred pounds like a vise. She made a curt nod toward his right hip.

"Do not draw that."

_What the hell_, he muttered to himself, feeling blood departing his face. He'd been so engrossed in watching the two odd-looking blokes that he'd missed it entirely. _Sloppy, Reese, you're getting soft_. But he could see it now, under the shallow light: doe eyes that burnt right through his skull. It had been, what, six years, maybe more; it certainly felt like several lifetimes ago. An ancient reminder of what lay behind the curtains.

"Do not draw that, Derek," she said.

The hair on the back of his neck erected, the skin-crawling sound of his name weaving down his spine. Three years ago, when the warden had wished him good riddance for being a model inmate, Derek had went straight to his old locker room, snatched the plughole out of the tiled floor and removed the small package glued under it: fifty thousand dollars worth of diamonds. He'd ridden the Greyhound upstate and beyond, gotten himself a cabin in the woods and a brand-new identity. He had not heard his real name since and it crept him out, but at the same time, it felt_ good_.

"They are here for you," she said. Derek kept his eyes locked onto hers, not daring to glance at the two vacant-looking, gray-clad men. They were up on their feet, too, and looked like bowstrings ready to snap.

She tilted her head to the side, as if trying to isolate the sound of their heartbeats from the background noise. "Humans," she deadpanned, "terminators would not mind the civilians. Time to go," she added with urgency.

"I can take care of myself!" he snarled.

"They are trained killers."

He tried to jerk her arm to drag her aside. "And what are you, _huh_?" he retorted furiously.

She resisted effortlessly and made a low, feline growl.

His knuckles had gone white where he had clenched her arm. He could not fathom how a quiet night at the club had turned so hastily into a nightmare from his old life: a man hunt. A second rumble shook the very foundations of the basement. The cleaving sound of thunder filled the room and the lamps flashed and burst into gleaming shards, leaving blurry shapes on his retinas, floating in utter darkness.

The blond girl pushed Derek backward. "Time to go," she shouted over the growing mayhem. He obeyed and they bumped into erratic patrons, half-running to random places on the verge of panic. The place reeked of perspiration. "Back entrance," she instructed. They tumbled through the plywood door and entered the deserted hallway, hastening their pace. The staircase was only a few feet away. She stopped for a split second when they clumsily reached the flight of steps. Derek heard a rustle behind them and caught sight of a moving shadow.

"What is it?" he pressed.

"Time has stopped," she said, then without so much of a how-do-you-do, she pushed Derek roughly across the last steps and through the locked metal gate, squeezing both of them through the gap she'd created. The lone streetlamp had survived the storm and still cast a pale halo on the parking lot. Derek felt bile ran up his throat when he saw a pair of long legs protruding on his right. Omar was slumped in his garden chair, a hole the size of a dime between his eyes. Footsteps intensified behind them, down the pitch black corridor.

"You were lucky to be off-duty, tonight," she said. Then, "To my truck," she ordered. "Go!"

They sprinted ahead on the wet tarmac and got side by side to the bed of a black Dodge Ram, panting. The roar of thunder was edging away… and they froze on the spot when they heard a _click_, the sound of a safety pin being lifted off. A tall man with a "Seattle Mariners" baseball cap emerged from behind the truck, a Beretta trained on Derek's head. He was also clad in gray, military-grade garments, but was much younger than the other two. His lips were folded into a thin, trembling pink line. The metal door of the nightclub burst open and Derek heard the fast stride of steel-capped boots on the asphalt. He raised his palms slowly behind his head when he felt a cold barrel ram his upper spine.

"Easy, easy," he gasped.

The raspy voice came from behind, "Good job, Lars." The gun was pressed harder into the soft flesh at the base of Derek's skull. In the unreal, silent aftermath of the storm, he could hear his watch ticking.

A third man grunted in the back, "Let's take him, now. The boss is not so partial on waiting."

"But, what about the girl?" said the capped boy, tightening his grip on his pistol.

"Don't sweat it," said Raspy, followed by a hoarse chuckle. "You'll get a slice of her, soon enough. Come on, girl. I wanna see your hands, now. Nice and easy."

Derek glanced at her. She had kept her head low, hidden behind her blond hair, and her hands were in the bed of the truck; the muscles in her forearm were tight, showing strained sinews underneath. Without the slightest inflection in her voice, she said, "I'm gonna show you my hands."

"We're losing time!" barked the third man, clicking the safety off his gun. "Just shoot the bitch and we take him."

Derek could still hear his watch ticking, but it seemed to slow down, more and more… then, he saw what the girl was holding in her hands and between two ticks of the second hand, time stood still.

_Tick…_ the shrieking sound of metal splitting the air. She spun at inhuman speed and the blade connected with the first neck, ripping the black skin open, the carotids and the spine underneath. Gravity had yet to claim the severed head when her sword reached the second guy, separating the top of his skull from the rest of his body, splattering brain matter all over the tarmac like a _goddamn_ Jackson Pollock's. The scalp made a harmonious, parabolic course across the droplet-filled air to land in a puddle near a car tire… _tick_.

Before Derek could react, she grabbed his collar and flung him to the ground, crouching over him and pressing her lithe frame hard against his body. Six rounds slammed into her back at point-blank, each recoil slamming her collar bone into Derek's face, nearly knocking him out. Then she bolted upright and without so much as a glance threw the sword over the truck's bed. The boy looked down on his torso where the blade had impaled him. He dropped his gun and staggered backward. She was on him before he could fall, holding him tight by the sides of his head.

"Who gave the order?" she demanded.

His eyes became unfocused and red foam formed at the corners of his mouth.

"Who gave the order?"

She sensed one last floppy heartbeat and the boy was gone. She pulled the blade off his chest and let the body fall limply on the wet tarmac. Slowly, she came to Derek, her sword resting at her side. She extended a tiny, blood-stained hand. The girl from the future. The girl from his past.

"Derek Reese," said Cameron. "Come with me if you wanna live."

* * *

**Author's ****note: **A thunderstorm, jumpers, killers and a Japanese sword… will Cameron and Derek find their way home?

I compare time _slippage_ to Hawking's radiations (pairs of particles that should annihilate themselves but one is lost in a black hole). Too much energy comes into one timeline when someone jumps (a unique person becomes _people_) – time is lost to compensate the overload.

Just send me a "nice" in the reviews if you like it or criticize it at length.  
See you in the world.  
Wakong


	2. Part One, Chapter Two

**Author's note: **I do not own the characters, the space-time continuum, etc. Main characters: Cameron, John, Derek and Sarah. And a bunch I will not divulge, here.

**Reviews' answers: **Thanks for the kind reviews.  
I cannot reveal just yet how the journey will unravel. I'm interested in two things, though, Cameron and John's relationship and Cameron and Derek's friendship/cooperation. We had a glimpse of the latter in the series (220: To the Lighthouse).  
Cameron is blond and wields a Japanese sword… Kill Bill, all right. Will she perform the Five-Point Palm Exploding Heart technique? Maybe...

**Summary: **The story is set six years after the events of Today is the Day (part two) and so we jump over the fate of Derek, Cameron and John. Sarah ditched Derek and Cameron, hiding John in the lighthouse with Charlie Dixon. She felt that Jesse's treason was Derek's, and that Riley's murder was an omen. An omen from _their _kind, an omen from Cameron's true nature. The four of them never reunited and six years have passed since 2008. A storm gathers, and in the eye of the storm stands a girl from the future, Cameron. Space and time have been stretched between her and John. She will travel with unexpected companions on an unexpected journey to find her way back. Heads and arms will be severed, Derek will wear Hawaiian shirts and the strands of time will be woven and unwoven.

* * *

**CROSSING LINES**

**PART ONE**

**THE FOUR CORNERS  
**

* * *

**CHAPTER TWO**

**IN WHICH DEREK WANTS TO RETRIEVE HIS CAN-OPENER**

**AND JOHN ALSO MEETS A BLOND GIRL**

* * *

Derek woke with a sore head and the cold awareness that he was utterly miserable.

"It's like an elephant took a dump in my mouth," he croaked. He tilted the rear-view mirror to see a battered face, a black and violet bruise spreading like a port wine stain under his right eye. "Did it stomp on my face, too?"

Cameron kept her eyes locked on the road. "No," she deadpanned.

The sky was slowly turning gray into a pale shade of red, casting a smooth glow beyond the cliff and on the moving crests of waves. The ocean was calm and flat on the horizon. The storm had passed.

"Got any water?" He was parched.

"Check the glove box."

He did and a heap of random shit fell on his feet – among which a tiny juice box with a rainbow-colored toucan on it. "Good call." He speared the box with the plastic straw and gulped down the undefined liquid. "Thought your kind was tidier."

"Not my car," said Cameron.

Derek slouched back against the dusty window and drifted into a shallow slumber. Bits of the night came back to him at random, untangled with figments of dream.

Gunshots and fire. She was standing there with a bloody sword. No, not _she_. It. Cameron. The _metal_. What the hell was she doing here? He was fine in his leatherette booth and somehow, some serious shit had hit the fan. Two tall guys came for him… and the third one, just a boy, impaled by the Japanese sword. The boy was stuffed with the other two in the back of a black van. She came to retrieve the head – a _fucking_ head – and threw it as so much garbage into the trunk of the van. Then she stepped backward and shot the gas tank: the van ignored gravity for a split second, fell back on its tires and burst into flames. The world merged into a blur. She made him drink something with a pill, maybe two, then he was lying on something hard with his chest bare and he was cold and she was rummaging through _him_.

Derek woke again and winced at the stabbing pain in his flank; he had a gauze dressing around his stomach, somewhat wet and reddish where he felt the sharp ache.

"You'll be okay," said Cameron. "One of the rounds went through me and lodged itself in your abdomen. I removed it."

They had left the shoreline. The road was now taking sharp turns into the steep terrain behind the cliff. Small pines stood idly on the side of the road, their brown roots peppered with bottle-green bushes, cracking the asphalt open. Derek resisted the urge to fall back into oblivion and tried to gather his thoughts.

"April 21, 2011," he whispered.

"What?"

"April 21, 2011," he said again, "my Judgment Day."

"I know," she answered, "it's mine, too."

"So what?" he snapped. "It's been three years, now. It's not happening?"

"I don't know," she confessed. "It will eventually. Judgment Day is inevitable."

He made a gruff sound in response. "I was good, you know," he finally said, "I kept my head low."

"It was just a matter of time before they'd find you."

Derek felt like his past years had be thrown down a bottomless pit: he was going to take the blame for whatever happened back at the club. The Ellison case had been dropped and he was out of prison and for once in his life, he had been a free man and he had been at peace with something. His face was going to pop up on the FBI database and the news channels. He could see it clear as day:

DEAD OR ALIVE

with a grainy picture of him beneath, unshaven in his crumpled shirt from Magnum PI.

"Who were they, anyway? That group – what was it – Kaliba, right?"

"I think they were something else," she said.

"What did they want from me?" he pressed.

"Interrogation. Then, termination."

He sighed and massaged his temples. "I don't get it. I'm nobody. I know nothing."

Despite the rampant misery of incarceration, Derek had breathed relief behind the rusty metal bars of his cell. It was somewhere in the middle of the second year that he had realized he was no pawn in John Connor's big chess game. Nobody had come down tearing the jail apart to break him out – or to separate his skull from his spine, for that matter. Nobody wanted him inside and nobody was waiting for him outside and he was fine with that. Still, he had resented spending his last days laundering sperm-stained blankets and stamping license plates for the state of California.

"You are the resistance," said Cameron, softly.

"Don't say that. Just_…_ don't." He shifted in his seat, trying to get into some kind of fetal position. "I need some rest."

Soon enough, he was clutched by the void and back to sleep.

* * *

John shoved bits of a dismantled rifle aside and laid out the paper map on the kitchen table. He smoothed the creased corners on the plastic tablecloth, adorned with pictures of ferns and rainforest trees. The map was a country-wide representation of America. John had pinned six red dots at various locations: three of them were lined up the west coast and three were spread five hundred miles inland.

Sarah Connor glanced up wearily from the mug of coffee she was currently nursing, volutes of steam lazily rolling up her cheeks. "What is that?" she asked. "A map of lightning strikes?"

"No. Radiation sites. I triangulated some of them from the readings of a government-sponsored lab… you remember when we jumped from the bank's vault, back in 2007?"

She nodded grimly.

"Well, what happened yesterday was an order of magnitude higher. The time slippage was _huge_, bigger than anything I expected."

Sarah knew about his son's theory about time travels and how they could stop time for a split second – no, a tiny split of a split-second. She was also positive that John was a self-taught genius in most aspects of physics and she could barely follow his train of thoughts most of the time.

She sighed wearily. "Meaning?"

"What happened in that back alley…" he said, "was not an isolated event."

Sarah exhaled slowly. She had been working the night shift during the storm: you would not consider mopping the floor of gas stations a fascinating activity, but their savings had worn thin over the last year; they only had a few diamonds left in the black pouch hidden under the sink. You could see the bottom of it, really.

John made the call and she had dropped the mop and drove straight to the back alley, a nondescript path between two major lanes, a few miles shy from their safe house. Both entrances had been yellow-taped and cops were literally crowding the place with forensics fussing over the crater. She had floored the gas pedal and the truck back to the safe house and spent the rest of the night in the Kevlar-stuffed chair facing the front door, a twelve-gauge shotgun armed with tungsten rounds on her lap.

"So," asked Sarah, sharply, "each dot on the map marks a crater with a naked guy in it?"

"Can't tell," said John. "Some of the radiation sites might be only artifacts from the storm. It's still early but the local precincts and the FBI are keeping it close to the chest."

The morning sky was bright and blue, showing no sign of the antediluvian storm that had wreaked havoc during the night. They had muted the small television screen propped on the counter: all the channels were parroting each other in a shallow attempt to report factually the origins of the

STORM OF THE CENTURY

"They won't be able to stifle the situation for long," said Sarah.

John made his way to the tiled counter. "Maybe they will," he said, pouring himself a cup of coffee, or rather, the coffee-brewed-by-his-mother, which was something else entirely: a brownish, overboiled, straight-down-to-the-bowels beverage. "I intercepted a short communication. It was mostly scrambled, but I think it came from higher up. Big Brother might be boggarting us."

He took a sip and winced at the sour taste. He needed it, though. He hadn't closed a single eyelid since… well, he couldn't tell anymore. "Where's Charlie at?" he asked.

"Early shift," she said. "The storm left a trail of broken wrists and ankles. And a dead cop," she added. "Got a lead on the whereabouts of our new _friend_?"

John shook his head. "Couldn't track him down after he snapped that poor fellow's neck. He's _foe_, though, not friend. From the bulk I'd say triple-eight or a higher model."

Sarah's knuckles went white on the mug's handle. "Got a good look on its face?"

"The video was to grainy and the camera didn't get the right angle. It was a _he_, though."

"You sure?"

"Saw his male parts, all right."

Sarah gulped down the last third of the boiled mixture, then with a few swift, economical movements, reassembled the rifle scattered across the kitchen table. She had made up her mind.

"Pack your things," she said.

He remained slouched against the counter. "You know where I stand on this," he said. "Keep our ground. Fight." He said that halfheartedly, tough. Arguing with his mother was like trying to stand ground to a hurricane.

Sarah poked the map and each red dot pinned on it with increasing violence. "That's good reckon you did, here," she said coldly. "But you're still a sloppy strategist. It's not a game of chess, John. There is no pawn hopping one square at a time, waiting for a countermove. Until we know better, each one of these dots is _foe_ and they're moving toward us."

They remained silent for a while. Then she said, more softly, "How's Savannah?" She had locked her up in the basement, a large concrete room they had padded with thick, plastered sheets of lead. It was not the first time they'd done this and Sarah knew that it was about time the girl would become mad and try to break down the steel door with her teeth and bare fists.

"Calmer than you'd think," said John. "She knows what's at stake." He fiddled with a loose thread on his shirt. "She's been making friends at school."

"I know she has," said Sarah. "But you also have a bullseye on your forehead, one of those things could be ringing our doorbell any minute, now. This is no desertion, John… we just don't have the upper hand, is all."

He sighed heavily. "I know, I know."

"What was that thing you told me? Back at that chess tournament with Andy. Something about the queen doing zigzags."

John sniffled. "Zugzwang. The Japanese had lost their master piece, the queen. It's called _zugzwang_."

"Well, we lost our queen a long time ago – we don't have _her _to fight and take bullets in our stead."

He brought down the cup harshly on the counter, spilling the hot liquid on his hand. _Shit_.

His anger died in his throat and they both froze when they heard the noise. The bickering between mother and son melted away and morphed into something else, something old and carved into their bones. Sarah popped two armor-piercing shells in the rifle's chamber and John crouched by the sink to retrieve the Remington and the six tungsten bullets resting in its magazine.

Someone had just rung the doorbell.

* * *

Derek dreamed of garbage and big chunks of concrete walls with bits of rusty metal protruding at right angles from them. He dreamed of the everlasting night and the tunnels. He dreamed of standing at attention on a white marble square, surrounded by humongous statues of metal: some looked like horses, some looked like towers and kings. John Connor sat on a throne made of skulls and made a vague gesture toward him: Derek moved forward, a mere pawn sent to slaughter. He was shitting himself, right now. He dreamed of rubber the color of sulfur in the shape of a human face and he dreamed of a red diode burrowed in it.

Then, he dreamed of _her_. She was standing in front of him in a white leather jacket, her long brown hair placated against her face, dripping water on the concrete floor and looking like a drowned rat. She cut the gray tape that had him restrained to the chair and she said, you're welcome.

Derek snapped awake when the car hit a bump. They had left the shimmering tarmac and were now on a dirt road, edging away from the pine forest. At the end of the trail, a wooden motel stood a bit off its axis, like a brothel-looking version of the Pisa tower. The neon sign was missing a letter. Cameron parked the truck in the inner courtyard.

"What are we doing here?" mumbled Derek, straightening up in his seat.

Cameron keyed off the ignition and exited the car swiftly. There was a huge mark on her seat: a dried-out blood stain in the shape of her lower back and shoulder blades. She strode to a door labeled with a silvery "7" turned upside down: the thing was loose on its screw. From here, she looked like she had been put through a meat grinder.

"Got stuff I need to retrieve," she called out, inserting a key with a little tag on it. "I won't be long."

Derek sighed and delved into the mess the glove box had puked all over the carpeted floor. He found a hand-crank flashlight, a pine-shaped freshener, empty wrappings of mint gums and a near-empty cigarette pack with brown butts lying around. He lit one of the cigarettes with the lighter socket and exhaled the smoke slowly. He thought of hiding the rest of the pack in his jeans' back pockets: cigarettes were a steady currency on the prison market. The parking lot was bereft of any other cars. A lone vending machine stood beneath the porch and a big lizard lay in front of it, basking in the morning sun. Most of the doors were covered in dust or missing their identification number… _welcome back, Derek. That's your kind of place, all right._

Cameron emerged from the room with a black armored suitcase and her leather jacket in one hand and a military bag bigger than her slung over her thin shoulder. She had changed her blood-stained garments by a set of fresh ones. She put her stuff on the backseats then came around to stand in front of him. She was cradling something in her hands.

"Here," she said, handing him her black leather jacket. The back of the thing was ripped and stained with gore. "I'm sorry," she added, "it's in bad shape, now."

Derek threw the butt of the cigarette through the open window. "What is it?" he asked. "It won't fit me, anyway."

"No," she said, "I meant to get it back to you. It's Jesse's jacket."

He stared at her.

"You left it in your truck, six years ago. You said I shouldn't touch it."

It came to him in some sort of a silent, black-and-white flash. He was in his old locker room, the one he'd burnt down after retrieving the diamonds. He had snatched the jacket from her hands, because it was Jesse's jacket, and she should not be touching that, no one should be touching that. Then she had said something about his unborn baby and the world had turned _red_. He had pinned her to the wall. _God_, he just wanted to put a bullet through her chin up to her silicon chip. He had wanted to do bad things to her in that moment, and some of them involved carnal punishment, something he would never admit to himself. He saw how John could be so easily fooled by her, the petite, ninety-pound brunette with the innocent doe eyes and that _fucking _pout.

He wanted to scream and shout and shove the bloody token of his past into her face. He _wanted_ to be angry, but the truth was… he didn't really care. She was staring at him and he felt no anger.

"Well, that thing is ruined," he said. "Did you wear it, at least?"

"I did. It's a tight jacket."

He leaned over the window and throw the remnants of the jacket across the yard toward the vending machine. The lizard skedaddled, startled by the sudden intrusion of its privacy.

"Well I guess it's served its purpose," he said. "What's in the suitcase?"

Cameron circled back to her seat and turned on the ignition. "Laptop," she said. "We need to investigate what happened."

"The bad guys, you mean."

She turned toward him. "No. Time has stopped. Time shouldn't have stopped."

"You said that before, back in the club. What does it mean?"

"I don't know, yet."

She put the truck in gear.

"Wait," said Derek, "where are we going?"

"South."

He shook his head. "No, we need to go to my place."

"_No_, we don't need to do that."

"We do and we will. You owe me."

She cocked a dubious eyebrow. "You owe me," she said. "I saved you. Twice."

"And you show up with your fake blond hair and your pert butt and I'm a fugitive again. We need to go to my cabin."

"They knew where you worked," she said, "they surely know where you live."

"My dog," was all he said.

"What?"

"My dog. We need to get my dog."

Minutes elapsed slowly. He thought he heard her make the faintest sigh.

"Come on… he's all I got left."

"What's his name?"

"Cano." He pronounced it _Canno_. "It's short for Can-opener."

"I'm not a dog person."

She made a U-turn in the courtyard then floored the throttle and they left the motel in a trail of dust.

* * *

John and Sarah knew all the floorboards that would make so much as a soft creak. They avoided them and got to each side of the reinforced door frame. A shadow was standing behind the hammered-glass panel. The bell rang again.

"Come on, guys," came the voice outside, "it's been a rough night."

Sarah leaned a bit harder on the door frame and lifted the safety pin off her rifle. John did the same. "Who are you?" she asked.

"It's Riley. Riley Dawson. You know me, right?"

They stared at each other open-mouthed. Then Sarah mouthed quietly to John, "Is that her?"

"How could it be?" he hissed through gritted teeth.

"You died a long time ago, girl," said Sarah to the door.

"_Huh_… no, walking and talking. I'd knew if I were dead, right?"

"Okay, take a few steps back," ordered Sarah.

"What?"

"Just do as I say or I swear I'll blow your fake yellow head into smithereens."

The girl took a few steps back on the wooden porch to appear in the visual field of the security camera. "Oh. Hi!" She waved at the blinking device.

"Is that her?" asked Sarah again, tilting the surveillance screen toward John. "She doesn't look _metal_, that's for sure."

"_Fuck_… I don't know, she looks a bit older."

"She's the Riley from our time, right? Still a child, somewhere."

"No," said John, "it's doesn't work like that. She's already jumped and died in our timeline. Or it means the future is an endless reservoir of our own selves. It doesn't make any sense."

"Let's ask nicely." Sarah pressed the intercom button. "Where do you came from?"

The disembodied voice crackled in the intercom. "Around here," she said.

Sarah punched the door frame. "What year, dammit!"

"Oh, sorry. 2031… could you just let me in? I could really use some form of food and a proper bathroom, right now."

Sarah sniffled in disdain, then she opened the door and stepped forward, the barrel of her rifle a few inches from Riley's face. The few patches of bare skin she had exposed were covered in grime, the rest of her body was draped in oversized, threadbare garments – the kind picked at random in the middle of the night. John appeared in the entrance and tucked his gun in his waistband.

Sarah turned back to his son. "Well?" she asked, a murderous glint in her eyes. The girl was ogling the ominous barrel shoved up her face.

"Yes," said John, "it's her, all right." Then he muttered to himself, shaking his head, "It doesn't make any sense."

"Okay, then." Sarah dropped the rifle loose to her side, grabbed the girl by the collar of her dirty "Let's go Beavers!" sweatshirt and rammed her forehead into her nose. Riley dropped to the ground in a "_fuck!_" and a hail of waving limbs, blood gushing from her nostrils. "Look at that!" exclaimed Sarah. "I called it: she's not _metal_."

John squeezed his temples hard between his thumb and middle finger. "Mom…" he sighed, "your skull would be cracked open like a ripe coconut if she were."

Sarah raised her hand apologetically. "Live and learn, I guess. You…" She grabbed a weeping Riley by the neck and threw her across the porch and into the house. "Welcome home."

John helped the girl to her feet. "I'm gonna pack my tech and free Savannah from her gaol," he said. "If Riley knew our address, others might, too," he added grimly.

Sarah walked back inside and slammed the door shut. She propped the rifle against the door frame and made a curt nod. "Glad we agree. I've already packed most of the weapons and ammo this morning. I'll call Charlie. We're out in fifteen minutes," she said.

"Make it twenty. I have to stop the bleeding. Just look at this mess…"

"Cotton wool's under the sink. I'll make pancakes."

* * *

**Author's note: **Second installment. On the road and planning for the road.  
Derek's dreams: Cameron freeing him from Kaliba (220: To the Lighthouse). Jesse's jacket: I suppose Cameron kept all their stuff.  
Riley Dawson, shouldn't she be dead?

A stranded bit from **Chapter Two** coming up next.

Just send me a "nice" in the reviews if you like it or criticize it at length.  
See you in the world.  
Wakong


	3. Part One, Chapter Two, Addendum

**Author's note: **I do not own the characters, the space-time continuum, etc. Main characters: Cameron, John, Derek and Sarah. And a bunch I will not divulge, here.

**Reviews' answers: **Thanks for the kind reviews.

**Summary: **The story is set six years after the events of Today is the Day (part two) and so we jump over the fate of Derek, Cameron and John. Sarah ditched Derek and Cameron, hiding John in the lighthouse with Charlie Dixon. She felt that Jesse's treason was Derek's, and that Riley's murder was an omen. An omen from _their _kind, an omen from Cameron's true nature. The four of them never reunited and six years have passed since 2008. A storm gathers, and in the eye of the storm stands a girl from the future, Cameron. Space and time have been stretched between her and John. She will travel with unexpected companions on an unexpected journey to find her way back. Heads and arms will be severed, Derek will wear Hawaiian shirts and the strands of time will be woven and unwoven.

* * *

**CROSSING LINES**

**PART ONE**

**THE FOUR CORNERS  
**

* * *

**CHAPTER TWO (****ADDENDUM)**

**THE RESCUE  
**

* * *

Cameron crouched near a fallen tree. Time had hollowed out its trunk and its insides were now covered with a thick layer of green moss where various colonies of insects had made a new home. Derek's cabin was small but sturdy: it was made of thick planks with a little porch on the front furnished with a barbecue and two wrought-iron chairs.

The plan was sound: get in, get the dog, get out. And what if they had left some men behind? My hardware is designed to terminate humans, she had said, my software is designed to terminate humans. Derek was glad to hear it and she had wagered he should be.

She had ripped the padlock of a two-panel fence and they had eased the truck down a trail of wet ground, a dense forest of teal-colored fir trees on one side and the soft gargle of a rill on the other. Derek had parked the car in a clearing littered with green-and-yellow fallen needles, thirty feet shy from the rocky bank of the small river. He was still disabled by his stomach wound and had been left behind. He had showed her a nondescript patch of green on his cellphone and had pointed right in the middle of it.

"My cabin is here," he had said. "But we can't take the main south road. We would be in the open…"

"I don't care about being in the open."

"… and I booby-trapped this part of the road."

"Do I care about booby traps?"

"You should. That's Semtex wired to a metal detector."

Cameron had cocked an eyebrow and he had said she shouldn't be looking at him with contempt because he had spent two years assembling mines for Connor's headquarters, and that he was damn good at it and he might blow up her fake nose if she didn't want to follow the plan. But the plan was sound.

She had hopped on the boulders protruding from the stream bed and climbed up the gentle slope on the other side. Then she had walked half a mile between fir trees and eight-foot tall ferns and got to the west side of the cabin.

Cameron put her palm on ground and burrowed her fingers into the loose soil. She tilted her head to the side. She could feel it, the _vibrations_… a mole, thirty feet from her… the tiny claws of a squirrel digging into bark… deep down, ants excavating new galleries… the soft gush of the river stream against the weathered boulders… the rubber sole of steel-capped boots on wooden floorboards… _there_.

She rose slowly and walked toward the cabin, making her way up to the porch: each step made a loud, high-pitched creak. Cameron stood in front of the door and waited. She could here a rustle behind the wood planks and safety pins being lifted off. The whispers came from both side of the door.

"_Is that him?_"

"_Heck if I know, there's no spyhole on the door. Maybe it's a bear._"

"_No, it's him. The dog would freak out if it was a bear – not having the best spot on the food chain, I mean._"

"_Okay, okay. The second he goes in, you shoot him in the kneecaps. Then, we wrap him up pretty for the boss._"

"_Sounds like a done deal to me_."

Cameron widened her stance and drew the Glocks from her waistband. She calculated the angles and pointed the suppressed barrels to each side of the door. They were about to discover _their _spot on the food chain when someone like her was on the prowl. She pressed the triggers simultaneously: two high-velocity rounds penetrated the planks in a hail of splinters… then a dull sound. She kicked down the wood panel: two men were lying still in a pool of crimson blood on each side of the entrance. The bullets had avoided their body armor and ripped through their throats.

The room was small and dusty with a kitchenette on the side. A worn-out couch was facing a wide television screen propped on the floor. Empty boxes of Chinese takeout littered the coffee table. Ahead, a closed door probably led to the bathroom.

"Dog?" she called out in the empty room. A muffled bark came in response. "Come out, dog." What came out, however, was far from her expectations.

Cameron ducked behind the couch when the door exploded, shredded into thousands of plywood chips. A man came out shouting foreign insults and firing his automatic rifle at random, turning the sparse furniture into smithereens. The man had his pants and boxers down to his ankles and his erratic movements made his penis wriggle into some kind of chaotic, double-pendulum motion. _Strange_.

Cameron leaped forward and unsheathed her sword in one swift movement: metal struck the air and the head of the man flew across the room, scattering the takeout boxes like so many bowling pins. Before his body collapsed from the sudden lack of central nervous system, she kicked him hard in the torso, tossing him back to the bathroom. The headless body ended its course on the toilet bowl where it sat limply, never to move again.

"It's okay, dog," called Cameron. "Bad people dead. You can come out, now."

* * *

**Author's note: **Pants and boxers down: defecation or masturbation? Have it your way… a potential _happy_ ending for him.  
This _addendum_ was on Cameron's perspective, which I'll try develop further in the next chapters.

Just send me a "nice" in the reviews if you like it or criticize it at length.  
See you in the world.  
Wakong


	4. Part One, Chapter Three

**Author's note: **I do not own the characters, the space-time continuum, etc. Main characters: Cameron, John, Derek and Sarah. And a bunch I will not divulge, here.

**Reviews' answers: **Thanks for the kind reviews and staying tuned.  
To **Chola**: Sorry girl but I won't go Derek/Cameron; the two protagonists will find a way to work together, though. I'm a regular John/Cameron shipper... I'm an has-been, I know, I know.

**Summary: **The story is set six years after the events of Today is the Day (part two) and so we jump over the fate of Derek, Cameron and John. Sarah ditched Derek and Cameron, hiding John in the lighthouse with Charlie Dixon. She felt that Jesse's treason was Derek's, and that Riley's murder was an omen. An omen from _their _kind, an omen from Cameron's true nature. The four of them never reunited and six years have passed since 2008. A storm gathers, and in the eye of the storm stands a girl from the future, Cameron. Space and time have been stretched between her and John. She will travel with unexpected companions on an unexpected journey to find her way back. Heads and arms will be severed, Derek will wear Hawaiian shirts and the strands of time will be woven and unwoven.

* * *

**CROSSING LINES**

**PART ONE**

**THE FOUR CORNERS**

* * *

**CHAPTER THREE**

**WHICH IS MOSTLY ABOUT HOW THE WORLD ENDS**

* * *

"You chopped the guy's head off?" blurted Derek. On the backseats, the German shepherd kept his eyes closed but still raised a suspicious ear to investigate the sudden noise.

Cameron had her feet stuck outside the passenger's window. The air gushing inside the car was ruffling her ash blond hair all around her face and shoulders. She swiveled a bit in her seat and looked at him with sham innocent eyes. "He came at me yelling in Spanish with his pants down," she said. "It startled me."

Derek chuckled and took the freeway exit on the right, slowing the truck down the gentle curve.

"This is not the good way," pointed out Cameron. They were southbound to Los Angeles.

"I know, but some of us need to eat and take a piss. I'm talking about the mammalian residents in the car."

Cameron turned her gaze back to the blurry landscape and wiggled her toes in the wind. They drove deeper into the country side until they reached Elkton, Oregon. Derek parked the truck in the parking lot of a nearby Denny's. He donned a fresh shirt Cameron had brought back from his cabin and put on big sunglasses and the "Seattle Mariners" cap she had taken from the dead boy back at the nightclub. He was pretty sure his face had popped up in every precinct's database by now and he did not relish the idea of being flagged between two mouthful of scrambled eggs.

Derek stepped out of the car with stiff legs and winced slightly at the pain in his lower belly. He opened the back door for Cano to bolt out from the backseats. He was now sprinting and making sharp turns around the parked cars, taking a piss at the occasional poles and chrome-plated rims. Derek went around to the passenger's side where Cameron still sat, staring unblinking at the sun from the opened window. "You coming or not?" he asked.

"I am no mammalian," she answered, spanning her toes into some kind of tiny flesh fan.

"Well, I'm going in. Suit yourself."

She came anyway.

Derek muzzled Cano before entering the diner. The place was half-empty and they found a well-placed booth near the back exit and facing the whole room. Cano came to sit stoically by his side. The waitress arrived in a fuss of pink fabric and Derek ordered coffee, eggs and bacon, and yes, some extra bacon would be nice, too, it's for the dog and of course ma'am, he will behave. And a coffee for my _lovely_ wife, sure thing.

A small television screen was propped on a telescopic arm screwed to the wall above the counter. It displayed the charcoal remains of a cabin in the woods. _His _cabin. The reporter, a black-haired woman with a stern face, ducked under the yellow tape to show three black, human-shaped plastic bags. Derek was famished and he devoured his breakfast with the _chic_ of a starving bear.

"So." He wiped the remnants of eggs off his beard. "You know you burnt down a solid ton of tuna cans and two dozens bags of brown rice."

"Did I?"

"Yes, I was stacking up food for – you know – when the nukes go down."

"You chose a good spot," she said, "this part of the coast was not flooded and remained radiation-free after Judgment Day."

He took a big gulp of coffee and belched quietly. "I know, Kyle and I lived there for a bit. _Shit_…"

"What is it?"

"We camped there in 2012, maybe 2013. We saw a deer up there. Anyway, it was a long time ago, but here it's like two years in the past. I'm getting headaches from this."

Cameron remained silent and took a sip from her cup. She took a lap, really, like some kind of cat or a nutjob that had forgotten how to drink and somehow had escaped the psych ward, thought Derek. She had a strange look on her face, too, and it unsettled him. On the television screen, the reporter was showing a fourth, separate plastic bag the size of a watermelon.

"You enjoyed beheading the poor dude, right?" prompted Derek.

"No," she lied. She did not mention that she'd made a strike on the takeout boxes with the head as a bowling ball: ten points!

"I'm not buying it," said Derek, "you have that… you know." He made vague circles with his forefinger. "_Glow_."

"Like a summer glow?"

"No, the kind of glow you have when you're drenched in sweat after having sex."

"I don't know about that," she lied.

"Well, cutting off heads makes you _glow_ and it creeps me out, is all."

"Then perhaps I should kill you to end your misery," she quipped.

Derek brandished his fork like a spear and Cameron dodged a propelled bit of egg yolk. "New rules," he said. "No decapitation when I'm around. I'm starting to remember bits of that night at the club and I don't like it."

She cocked an inquisitive eyebrow.

"The first guy you hit… I didn't know a human body could stay up on its feet so long after losing its head. Like chickens that run around the barn after you chop their heads off. But he was not running, he just stood there like a _bloody_ modern art fountain."

"Humans are full of surprises," she said. "And full of blood."

The pink-clad waitress came back with the carafe. Her name tag said:

HELLO MY NAME IS MOLLY

"Can I get you guys anything else?" She refilled Derek's cup to the brim, then, "Oh, honey. You didn't even drink your coffee. Is everything alright?"

"She's alright… Molly," interjected Derek. "And we're gonna hit the road, anyway."

"Where to?"

"_Huh_… Fresno."

"That's nice," she said politely, taking the lie at face value, and she was away in a rustle of pink.

Cameron took another lap at her coffee.

"Would you stop doing that?" asked Derek, sharply.

"I'm blending in."

"You don't have to blend in," he said and made some kind of mystical gestures in front of her, "I know what's _inside_." He rose with wobbly knees. "I'm gonna take a piss. Pay the cashier."

* * *

John Connor moved the queen forward: she stopped right in front of a white pawn to threaten a bishop on the right and a knight on the left. The king was cornered on a black square between his rooks. The end was near, he could feel it. John sacrificed his black queen on the knight, forcing a pawn to claim his master piece. He still had two bishops on the far side. He always relied on bishops, he loved the way they could cross the entire board in deadly diagonals. In French, they were called the _fous_, the madmen. It suited him, all right. He moved his bishop – the one that could only step on black squares – to the side of the board. A white rook came to protect the king from the assault, pinning down itself on the spot, and John moved his own rook to the last, adverse row. The white king was trapped between his suffocating army of pawns and rooks. A message blinked on the screen:

CHECKMATE BLACK WINS

John had defeated the machine. He closed the lid of his laptop and leaned back into the passenger's seat.

"Having fun?" asked Sarah, checking the rear-view mirror.

"Not really," he said. He remembered fondly the time he couldn't beat the machine. Of course, the machine was not a program on his computer, she was in the shape of a girl. A girl he had met a long time ago in the corridor of that hick town's high school in New Mexico.

"I was asking our guest," said Sarah.

Riley was slumped in the backseats. She had remained dead silent for more than two hours, now. Of course, they had broken the nose of the poor girl, put a black bag on her head and tossed her in the truck to God-knows-where. The desert? The ocean? She knew the Connors were paranoid folks and right now she was pretty sure she would end up digging her own grave somewhere between two cacti or being tossed in raging waters with her feet chained to dumbbells. John had given her some strong stuff, too, and she was slowly emerging from the thick brain fog.

"_Fuck you_," she drooled.

"She's alive!" quipped Sarah. "Come on, John. You can remove the bag, now."

"Thank you," mumbled Riley, but in her head she was going _ohgosh ohgosh ohgosh_.

John swiveled in his seat and removed the bag. Riley squinted her eyes to the sudden blinding light. The world outside the car came into focus and revealed a flat and dry barren land made of infinite sand speckled with lonely, desiccated shrubs. They were on the turnpike, eastbound to another safe house they had prepped in the suburbs of Albuquerque, New Mexico. She did not know that, yet.

"Are you guys going to kill me?" she blurted out. "Because you have to believe me, you have to believe me! I'm not going to –"

"Calm down." John raised a hand to cut the ramble that was quickly growing into hysteria. "We're not gonna kill you. We just didn't want you to know where we were heading, is all."

Riley took a few short, shallow breaths, trying to smolder the searing anguish spreading inside her stomach.

John leaned back into his seat and rummaged into the tactical backpack between his feet. "Here." He tossed her a small plastic bottle filled with water.

She quenched her thirst with a few big gulps.

"If we wanted you dead, you'd be dead already," said Sarah, steering the truck to overtake a semitrailer.

Riley wiped the water from her lips with her sleeve. "Fair enough."

"I'm the fairest of them all, ain't I." Sarah turned to John. "Contact Charlie, see if he wants to stop or something. Wouldn't mind taking a piss in a proper bathroom, too."

John took the little handheld transceiver from the glove box. He deployed the plastic antenna and turned the switch until it reached the right frequency. "King castles queenside," he said in the mouth-piece.

The voice came crackling after a few seconds with the code, "_Rook_ _checks king. Johnny-boy. You okay, son?_"

"We okay. Mom wants to know if you wanna take a break."

"_Would be a fine idea. Savannah's sleeping in the rear but I wager she wouldn't say no to waffles._"

The girl had not made any kind of tantrum, not even the slightest comment when they had hit the road with a truckload of weapons and a strange woman dressed in half-torn clothes and a bag over her head.

"Okay. We take the next… mom, what's the next exit?"

"Wintersburg."

"Heard that?"

"_I did, Johnny. See you in the world._"

The communication went dead and John snorted. "Wintersburg's a hick town," he said.

"We've been in worst places," retorted Sarah.

He turned his gaze to the blurred, desolate landscape.

"I guess we have."

* * *

Dusk came like a migraine. Derek had taken his place back behind the wheel; the road kept him awake and prevented his mind from rummaging through dark places. Cano was still sleeping on the backseats, making soft dream noises, and for the sanity of his mind, Cameron had tucked back her legs into the compartment and closed the window. She was sitting still with her eyes closed, though, and it made him… _edgy_.

She did not react when he left the turnpike and drove a few miles inland to find what he considered to be a proper motel – by proper, Derek meant something with a neon-sign that was not missing any letter. He was running on fumes and needed to rest on something _mattress-like_. He parked the Dodge Ram and keyed off the ignition. He slouched back heavily in his seat and drummed the steering wheel with his thumbs.

"You sleeping or something?" he finally called out.

The German shepherd made a gruff noise. Minutes elapsed slowly before Cameron answered, "I don't sleep."

"Well, just do something, then. You look like a corpse and it creeps me out."

She kept her eyes shut. "It creeps you out when I'm _glowing_, it creeps you out when I'm not. Would you give the girl a break, already?"

_You're no girl_, he thought, but didn't say it. Another minute and she finally opened her eyes. She blinked a few times.

"We're not on the road," she stated.

"You're a regular Nancy Drew, ain't you?"

"Where are we?"

"Half an hour shy of San Francisco."

She made some kind of sigh. "It's like I'm traveling with two dogs," she said.

"What is that supposed to mean?"

"I don't understand what you're barking and you can't follow a set of instructions for more than ten minutes. Why aren't we moving?"

"That's the problem when traveling with animals: we need to take breaks. And you were not moving, it was freaking me out."

"Humans are strange. They eat, they sleep, they wake up and do that all over again. And there is always something that freaks you out."

She was giving him a damn headache already. "Why do you talk so much?" She titled her head to the side. "You were always like 'yes' and 'no' and 'thank you for what-the-_heck_' and now you make long sentences. It confuses me."

She stared at him as if he was a pug that had suddenly developed the gift of speech.

"What were you doing, anyway?" he asked.

"Listening to the flow of time."

"Again, the _time_ thing. Would you fill me in, already?"

"You wouldn't get it."

"Try me."

"I mean, you cannot feel it. Back at the club, time stopped."

"For how long?"

"Two microseconds."

"Is that big?"

"Freaking big. And it happened before: when we jumped from 1999. When you and your men jumped back in 2007."

"So, someone jumped yesterday," he said. "Do I get this right? And don't look at me like _that_, I'm not that stupid."

"You got this right," she agreed. "But two microseconds mean _jumpers_. Plural."

"Friends of foes?"

"I don't know," she confessed.

"I do feel a bit kidnapped, here," said Derek after a few minutes of pensive silence. "So are you gonna stuff me in the trunk and take the wheel or we can stop for the night?"

"We can stop for the night. You can help me with something."

"I can be useful to _you_?" he asked in mock awe. "Who would have thought?"

She made a faint smile. "Yes, who would have thought?"

"What kind of _help_ do you need, anyway?"

"You'll see… then I will terminate you. I'm gonna pay for the room." She exited the car and strode toward the reception.

Derek made a sour laugh. _God, that bitch creeps me out_.

Cameron paid the clerk while Derek freed Cano from the backseats so he could relieve his bladder against a bottle-green sedan. The room was nice enough, even though it was covered in some kind of blueish carpet from the floor to the plaster ceiling. It had a small table and two chairs in front of a large window and a king size bed. Derek crashed on it like a lump of meat while Cameron _violated _a vending machine: he had expressed a sudden _urge_ for some form of food. She dropped the stuff on the white sheets just next to him: a small mountain of Funyuns, Snickers and Sprite cans. She had also fetched her Japanese sword and a small toolbox from the truck. She sat at the window and watched the vacant parking lot while he fed on the onion-flavored snack and the Snickers, which he split fifty-fifty with Cano.

"Are you done?" she asked when he leaned back on the bed and belched loudly, sliding his hands behind his head.

His mind was hammering _noes_ but he sighed and said, "Yes. Let's deal with whatever you need me to do."

She closed the thick curtains, stood up and came to him. She removed her top, taking her bra with it, revealing her small breast and small brown nipples. Then she took a silvery penknife out of her pocket and switched the blade open.

"Ready?" she asked.

You couldn't say that he was.

* * *

The Connors sat in silence in a secluded booth. The place was empty, save for the young waitress, her cheeks covered with acne, watching her phone behind the counter and an old dude in cowboy boots. John _hated_ cowboy boots. The floor was shiny and tiled with big, black and white squares, not unlike a disproportionate checkerboard. They had given Riley a fresh set of clothes and some baby wipes to clean her face and hands. There was still grime underneath her nails, though, but it would not bring much attention. She also had a baseball cap to hide her dirty mane. Riley sat between Savannah and Charlie, facing John and his mother on the other side of the Bakelite table. Savannah had just finished her waffles.

"So," said Sarah with an ominous tone, "let's talk."

"In front of Savannah?" asked Riley, glancing at the girl on her side. "She's still a bit young."

Sarah cocked an eyebrow. "You know her?"

"Heard you over the walkie-talkie. And of course, I know Savannah Connor."

"Don't speak that name, here," hissed Sarah. "The name is Gage, for now." Riley nodded her understanding. Then, "You said you were from 2031," she stated.

"I am."

"What were you back there? Military? Tech-Com?"

"No," she confessed, "just a random face in a crowd of random people. But the war chief came to find me. I mean, John. I worked in one of the strongholds in Yellowstone. It's carved into the mountain's galleries."

"And I sent you back," said John. He clenched his fist around his mug's handle. Being reminded of his future self always gave him a feeling of doom that stretched between rightful anger and utter fear. "I remembered you," he added, softly.

"You trusted me, anyway," said Riley.

"I entrusted you to do what?"

"To deliver a message. You said that, if it didn't come from someone you already knew, you'd have a hard time accepting it. And that your mother might kill the jumper on sight."

Sarah made a sharp nod of acknowledgment. "Damn true."

"What's the message about?" pressed John.

"The end of the world."

"So, it's happening…" sighed Charlie. He put his arm around Savannah's shoulders.

"What is the date?" demanded Sarah.

Riley sat back up straight in her seat and her face became neutral, as if she was about to recite an eulogy. "August 24, 2018," she said.

They all stared at each other – not Savannah, however, currently nursing a big strawberry milkshake.

"Four years from now," said John. "Hell."

Sarah was losing her temper but she kept her voice low, "You were sent back to tell us that? A date?"

Riley leaned over the table. "No," she said, "not just that. I'm here to tell you how it happens."

Sarah snorted. "You're not the first one to carry this message. You should know that our previous attempts at stopping Armageddon were met with disappointment." Still, she had became quite an artist in the _destruction of property_ business. "You guys just keep pouring from that God-forsaken future," she added grimly.

"I'm sorry… I guess? Anyway, he said you're not gonna like it," whispered Riley. "John said that, I mean."

"Just talk or I swear I'm gonna get intimate with that nose anew."

"Are you always so intense?"

"Yes," echoed John and Charlie and Savannah nodded vehemently, sipping her milkshake through a large bamboo straw.

So Riley told them.

"No!" blurted Savannah, bolting upright with clenched fists. "You're a liar!"

The waitress and the lone patron turned briskly toward the sudden noise.

"Calm down, sweetie." John reached across the table to caress her tiny arm. She took shallow breaths for a minute. Her face had became _red_. She finally obeyed and sat back, quietly crying.

"It's true," said Riley, sternly.

"Explain yourself," said John.

Riley knew she was not addressing the boy at the moment, but the cold and calculating man that had sent her back. And that she should not _fuck_ with him, right now. She told them her piece from the top.

"It was a government-funded project. It came on the news a year before or so. It was the LRAAN. It stands for… let me think… long-range anti-aircraft network. Does it make sense? Then the news channels renamed it. For the sake of the audience, really. It became the Sky Protection Network, and then just Skynet, just a few weeks before the bombs fell. Most of us were wiped out. But we fought back. We hid at first, but you came around, you knew everything. You were some kind of _messiah_ to us, you knew how to kill them, how to reprogram them and we fought on your shoulders. Then it was around 2029 or 2030… we found something in the basement of a government facility. The place was wrecked and covered with moss and small trees, but still, we found files and papers."

John held up his hand. "What kind of papers?"

"The classified kind. And there was a picture of _it_. The _metal_. It was captured at some point and they used the goddamn chip to build Skynet. It was the right architecture to sustain the AI or something, I don't really know about that stuff. That's why I'm here," she finished, "to tell you we need to burn _it_ down."

John made a gesture toward the counter. They remained dead silent until the young waitress came over to refill their mugs and back again behind the tiled counter with a forced, metal-braced smile.

"I hear you call Cameron _metal_ again, I put a bullet through your skull. Copy that?"

Riley made some kind of gulping sound in agreement. "Loud and clear," she croaked.

"John?" said Sarah, resting a soft hand on his shoulder.

"That's a gambit I did not foresee. I need to think," he said. He took a sip from his mug and sighed. "I need to think."

* * *

James Ellison fell on his hands and his body jerked and fumed and he rolled out of the searing ground. He felt like he was lying on a bed of fiery, angry worms. They said it was like being born again and he had thought in his inner, calm self, that these were just _words_ but still, he had prayed _hard_.

These were no mere words. The crushing heat had been so wet and _solid_, his bones had been compressed and shattered and he had been squeezed out of a womb made of black clouds and thunder. His lungs had deflated and blossomed back in his chest with a sharp pain, increasing with each shallow, inefficient breath. But no air was coming and he was suffocating and the world had melted and forged itself back into something else.

He felt the ozone-tinted air penetrate his chest and he cried out like a newborn. _Get it together, James_. He'd kept his mind over the years, he'd kept his faith. His body was decaying but his mind kept him going. James Ellison crawled and got up to his feet. The orders were already vanishing like so many figments of dreams… _run between the two hills and keep on going_. He did. James ran and his body ached and his bare groin was swinging in the damp air… it was the worst. The sand was gruel on the sole of his feet and he kept on running, leaving behind the vitrified crater. _Find the Connors, James. Find them. Survive._

* * *

**Author's note: **And the pawns begin to move...

Just send me a "nice" in the reviews if you like it or criticize it at length.  
See you in the world.  
Wakong


	5. Part One, Chapter Four

**Author's note: **I do not own the characters, the space-time continuum, etc. Main characters: Cameron, John, Derek and Sarah. And a bunch I will not divulge, here.

**Reviews' answers: **Thanks for the kind reviews and the support. It keeps the story going.

**Summary: **The story is set six years after the events of Today is the Day (part two) and so we jump over the fate of Derek, Cameron and John. Sarah ditched Derek and Cameron, hiding John in the lighthouse with Charlie Dixon. She felt that Jesse's treason was Derek's, and that Riley's murder was an omen. An omen from _their _kind, an omen from Cameron's true nature. The four of them never reunited and six years have passed since 2008. A storm gathers, and in the eye of the storm stands a girl from the future, Cameron. Space and time have been stretched between her and John. She will travel with unexpected companions on an unexpected journey to find her way back. Heads and arms will be severed, Derek will wear Hawaiian shirts and the strands of time will be woven and unwoven.

* * *

**CROSSING LINES**

**PART ONE**

**THE FOUR CORNERS**

* * *

**CHAPTER FOUR**

**IN WHICH THE WHITE QUEEN CALLS**

* * *

What Derek presumed would be simple mechanics – by that he would consider a discarded motorbike on the side of the road to be fairly simple, you could find plenty of them in the future – was actually a conundrum of tiny metal plates, optical wires the width of a hair and solid-state circuits that would make the insides of an iPhone look like an early, gross concept of the Babbage Machine.

Cameron sat on the chair, bent over the table. Her back was still a bloody mess from the night at the club. If one of the rounds had penetrated right through her hip to end up in his stomach, the five other bullets had lodged themselves into her back: two in her lower spine, which he had extracted easily, two where her lungs should be, which was also a simple access, and one in her right shoulder blade. This last bullet was… what, a pain in the ass? _No_, that would the understatement of the century. The _frigging_ thing had embedded itself into a complex network of wires that sat behind her skeleton. She had given him the knife so he could peel the skin off her upper back, which was a bit _sanguine_ and smelt like blood and iron and a "frog course" – the one with the dissection in it. He had to go into the bathroom and wash his hands several times because her fake blood was _so _sticky. The shoulder blade had many insertion points into her spine and what served as a collar bone, but most of them acted like hinges and he had been able to remove it without much strain. The thing was light as a feather, but he did not mention it.

Under the shoulder blade – which he put gently on the table – rested what Derek considered to be a chaotic representation of electronics imagined by a mad contemporary artist; he could almost hear the little bugger: _oh yes, my dear, it's a modern critic of our technological society, you know, I placed some bits of wires and shit here and there… why ma'am, to make it look like a goddamn puzzle, all right. I do love me some puzzle, you know, not the soothing kind with lake pictures, mountain peaks and a thousand pieces, oh no, I prefer my puzzles made of a million, pitch black pieces that drive you freaking nuts_.

Derek was sweating like an exhausted bull and he could feel droplets fill the creases on his forehead. The first time he tried to remove the bullet, Cameron went limp on the table and she drooled something like _plugbackcable plugbackcable_. So he did plug back the cable, and the second time he tried to remove the bullet with the needle-nose pliers he had taken from the toolbox, her arms jerked and the shoulder blade he had neatly put next to her went flying across the room to bury itself into the bathroom wall… he already had trouble playing _Operation _with Kyle as a child, _this_ was another dimension of nightmare.

"Could you please be gentle?" asked Cameron against the table. Her voice had a strange, inhuman quality to it, not unlike that tedious Siri living in his phone.

"I am being _gentle _but your body is a fucking mess. It's like an ordeal to leave the seventh circle of Hell or something… third time's the charm, right?"

"I don't like this kind of logic," she protested against the table.

"You don't like anything. You're a..." He pressed the handles of the pliers together like a vise. "Tough." He put both his hands on the handles. "Metal." He pulled with all his strength, tendons and veins bulging in his neck. "Bitch!" He staggered backward and hit the far wall behind him. The crushed bullet was sitting pretty between the jaws of the pliers. "Yes!" he shouted victory to the ceiling… and Cameron was now flaccid as a proverbial catfish on the beach.

"You alright?"

He poked the soft skin then tried to shake her awake. Her cheek was resting sluggishly on the table and her eyes stared into nothingness, unfocused.

"_Fuckfuckfuck_!"

Then she glanced up at him and said, "I fooled you."

He came to sit on a chair on the opposite side of the table, shoved aside some precision screwdrivers laying around and took his face in his hands, breathing out heavily through his fingers.

"Can you scratch my back?" she quipped.

"Don't push it," he grunted. "Connor used to repair you himself, right? A fucking _nightmare_ is what it is."

"We are more complicated than you think."

"More _intricate_, you mean. I guess they don't teach that in Caltech."

"Not yet," she managed to mumble against the table. Then, "Thank you."

"Well, thanks for taking the bullets in your back in the first place."

She wriggled and drummed her fingers on the table. "Looks fine. You did a good work."

"Yeah? Looks like a wreck under the…" He pointed his thumb toward the shoulder blade embedded in the wall. "How does that work, exactly?"

"Neural networks circumvent the damaged area and enable me to operate at suboptimal levels until full repairs are complete."

"And again you mistake me for Connor… I only understood damage and repairs, here."

"Damage means I'm not one hundred percent."

"And who can perform the full repairs?"

"Connor," she said with a dull voice.

Derek laughed grudgingly. "What about _daddy_? Can't Skynet put his toys back together?"

"Skynet would just discard me and make a fresh one. Only humans repair machines."

"Silly of us, _huh_? One day we fix the _beloved_ toaster, the next day it goes door to door looking for Sarah Connor."

Cameron made a muffled noise that resembled a silent outrage and then, "Would you…"

"Yeah, yeah."

He drank some fresh water from the faucet in the bathroom, yanked the shoulder blade off the wall with much swearing, shooed Cano away when he found him licking the sham blood on Cameron's back, and was back to work: reassembling the _beloved _machine in one piece.

* * *

Sarah parked the truck curbside. When they stepped out of the air-conditioned compartment, the hot night engulfed them like a leaden shroud. They had taken rounds behind the wheel to get some sleep: with two cars, three drivers, and the fact that Savannah wouldn't ride with Riley, you could say it had been some kind of a twelve-hour long _river crossing puzzle_ until they reached Albuquerque. They mustered the remnants of morale they had left to bring the solid ton of boxes and army bags into the living room. The place looked old: it was like the eighties had puked half-digested furnishings on the parquet floor and the wallpaper displayed green and pink flower patterns.

Charlie was driving the weaker Subaru and got to the safe house half an hour later, carrying a sleeping Savannah in his arms. He lay her down on the couch while they started to sort the gargantuan mess out. Riley had vanished upstairs and into the bathroom. They were fine with that. They had tried to grill the blond girl – all of them being the bad cop, obviously – but most of the journey had been spent in cold silence and they didn't want to deal with the bird of ill omen just yet.

Sarah went down the flight of steps that led to the basement with the weight of a dead man on the back. The walls of the concrete room were lined with shelves made of metal and plywood. She laid down the bag on the floor and started to unpack a fraction of their arsenal: a wide array of guns, rifles, shotguns and armor-piercing ammunition that could supply a guerrilla warfare. Sarah had to make lots of trips to bring the artillery downstairs and the living room was gradually sorting itself out. At some point, Savannah woke up and made the pretense of carrying things around – mostly the cushions that were already there in the first place. Another trip and the girl was watching reruns of _My life as a teenage robot_. Another trip and John and Charlie were hugging like long-lost bears. John was holding some kind of tarnished locket attached to a silvery chain. He had grown big in the last years and was now taller than Charlie by a few inches. Still, he always looked like a kid when he was with the older man. Sarah made the last trip with a bag full of Semtex and started to store the weapons in the shelves. The boys left her alone and she was fine with that. The basement was now a _shrine_ to her and they knew better than to disturb the _holy_ labor. Two hours later, her white tank top had turned gray with perspiration. She made her way up and found the living room free of boxes and bags, almost neat and organized. The place sill looked like a boudoir, though, with the dusty carpets and these _creepy _ivy patterns climbing up the walls to the wooden ceiling. John and Savannah had slept on the couch top to tail for a while, then the boy had carried her to one of the bedrooms. Sarah felt rough hands sliding on her flanks to come and rest on her stomach.

"It's never gonna stop," she whispered. "Is it?"

Charlie sighed in the nape of her neck. "We're safe, for now. Come on," he added before she could speak her mind on the matter of safety, which they all knew _very_ well. "I brewed some coffee."

He led her to the kitchen and they kissed briefly. They were both weary and might drop unconscious for forty-eight hours straight if they sat down, so they remained slouched against the counter in a half-standing position, nursing two crazed ceramic mugs.

"What does John think?" she finally asked. "I saw you two talk, earlier."

"He's confused. He's angry."

"Do you trust that girl?"

"John told me she was pretty much the same, even though the _original _was born in the tunnels."

"Doesn't make much sense, does it?"

"It does not to me. I think it does to him."

Sarah chuckled. "You think you can read through that boy's mind?"

"I do," he answered gravely. "I know if he's up to something, at least."

"Anyway, if that blond minx is the same, then we cannot trust her entirely. You remember what she tried to pull on us."

"The Jesse case, right?"

Sarah spat the name back, "Jesse. Derek's bitch."

"It was that woman's doing. Not the girl."

She exhaled slowly and blew some air on the steaming liquid. "Maybe," she mused. "Did you talk about _her_, then?" Charlie remained silent. "You're not gonna tell me, are you?" It was a statement, actually.

"Boys' talk," he answered. "Privacy clause."

Sarah faked a laugh. "Well, I hope you talked _strategy_. If that girl is right… we need to destroy her chip."

"That bit you can trust, _huh_?"

"And you don't?"

Charlie put down his mug on the tiled counter and scratched his stubble, gathering his thoughts. "Cyberdyne, the Turk, Zeira Corp, the Hunter-Killers and those Kaliba grunts at the lighthouse… you blew them all sky high and yet, Riley is here. The future's still out there. Don't you think that Cameron might just be… Cameron?"

"I'm not sure I wanna take the risk, Charles."

"Figure it out. For John's sake. And don't call me Charles. You know I hate it."

She smiled wearily and laid her hand on his cheek. She came closer and they kissed. "What you gonna do about it, _Charles_?" she smirked against his stubble. She shoved the mugs aside and sat on the counter and they made love in silence. They clutched onto each other for a while, panting. They exhaled the storm and they exhaled the bad omens and they exhaled the height hundred miles of asphalt stretched between Los Angeles and Albuquerque.

Soon enough, Charlie left the kitchen and made his way upstairs. Sarah pressed her temples hard between her fingers and she thought about _her_, the bloody token of the future… Cameron. Sarah was not _good _with compromises. She strolled to the living room in her panties and tank top and threaded lightly on the floorboards. Dawn was slipping in softly and Sarah found what she was looking for in the orange dimness. She stepped back into the kitchen and over her discarded jeans and she went down the flight of steps to the basement. There, she flipped open the prepaid phone and dialed the number. Sarah had made up her mind. Her son would understand. Her son would _forgive_, she told herself. The phone rang three times.

"White queen takes pawn," she said and waited for the code in response. "We need to meet."

* * *

Derek's wound had been _gnawing _and _pulling _in his stomach and he had managed to wash himself, crouching in the tub to avoid the gauze dressing. When he came out with a towel wrapped around his midsection, Cameron had her bare back to him. He had stapled the flaps of skin together and deemed it to be a fine handiwork. Then he fell on the bed and into oblivion and the night was cut with noises and visions.

He dreamed of the prison and the rusty bars and he dreamed of stamping the date of Judgment Day on a million license plates and he dreamed of stapling people onto walls and it made _taptaptaptaptap_.

At some point, Derek half-emerged from sleep. The room was dark and her small naked form was ethereal, bathed in the laptop's blue glow… _taptaptaptaptap_. She was drumming and tapping away at inhuman speed on two separate keyboards, filling the screen with endless columns of code and she was probing and scratching Cano's ears with her toes. The dog was curled asleep under the table and he squinted his eyes blissfully to the touch and Derek thought that it was _senseless_. Then he dreamed of electric birds and the chirping woke him up. Dawn was already snaking its way through the thick curtains.

"Black queen takes knight," said Cameron in the mouth-piece of the flip phone. "Where are you?"

Derek's brain was still foggy and he couldn't make much sense out of the conversation. Then his clothes were shoved into his face and he growled something like _fuck _and_ bitch _with a furred mouth.

"We need to go," said Cameron.

"Who was that on the phone?" he mumbled in a heap of guttural sounds.

"Sarah Connor."

* * *

**Author's note: **A small chapter to introduce the next installments... the queens' meeting. One of them traveling with two dogs.

Just send me a "nice" in the reviews if you like it or criticize it at length.  
See you in the world.  
Wakong


	6. Part One, Chapter Five

**Author's note: **I do not own the characters, the space-time continuum, etc. Main characters: Cameron, John, Derek and Sarah. And a bunch I will not divulge, here.

**Reviews' answers: **Thanks for reviewing this work. It's a fine propellant for writing more.  
to **capuGino**: thanks a lot for the support. I'm glad you appreciated the global humor of the story. I never set foot in an English-speaking country, hence the odd prose.

**Summary: **The story is set six years after the events of Today is the Day (part two) and so we jump over the fate of Derek, Cameron and John. Sarah ditched Derek and Cameron, hiding John in the lighthouse with Charlie Dixon. She felt that Jesse's treason was Derek's, and that Riley's murder was an omen. An omen from _their _kind, an omen from Cameron's true nature. The four of them never reunited and six years have passed since 2008. A storm gathers, and in the eye of the storm stands a girl from the future, Cameron. Space and time have been stretched between her and John. She will travel with unexpected companions on an unexpected journey to find her way back. Heads and arms will be severed, Derek will wear Hawaiian shirts and the strands of time will be woven and unwoven.

* * *

**CROSSING LINES**

**PART ONE**

**THE FOUR CORNERS**

* * *

**CHAPTER FIVE**

**IN WHICH THE BLACK QUEEN ANSWERS**

* * *

Cameron heard the characteristic sound of a phone being crushed and she did the same with hers, discarding the plastic remnants on the table. It was the rule: to destroy the phones; hence the second rule: to have spares. She strapped her Wakizashi sword between her shoulder blades and sashayed from her sentry position at the window to the king size bed and the lump of human meat sprawled on it like a washed-up starfish. She threw a set of fresh garments on Derek Reese's face and said that they needed to go, to what the man responded with a furious flapping of arms and something like _duck_ and _itch_. Nonetheless, he began to don the boxers and pants, albeit unsteadily. He was hoarse and confused from the sudden arousal.

"Woo-dat-on-daphone?" he vocalized like a trained ape.

"Sarah Connor," answered Cameron.

He snorted but made no comment. Derek finished dressing quickly with a colorful shirt populated with exotic birds, which he tucked neatly in the waistband of his jeans.

"My dog is deficient," he stated dubiously, lacing up his boots.

"How so?" Cameron had widened her stance to maintain balance: Cano was bumping into her and making zigzags between her legs.

"He's supposed to warn me," continued Derek.

"From what?"

"Your _kind_. But look at that, he just wants to get jiggy with every limb you got hanging. Should have neutered him."

Cameron tilted her head to the side, trying to keep track with the furry shape fussing happily around her, and she agreed that the dog might be deficient. She thought of a future where men would not castrate dogs but rather kill the pups and cook them along with the placenta for proteins and nutrients; Skynet had redefined harshly what survival meant.

They left the room and its blueish, carpeted walls. Outside, the vending machine still stood precariously under the porch, an unlucky, violated witness of their halt at the motel. Cano bolted between the parked cars and disappeared from view. The sky was a light shade of gray and filaments of clouds were drifting lazily in the high atmosphere and Derek grabbed a cigarette from his chest pocket. He crumpled the butt under his heel when he was done and threw it in the gutter, then he whistled: the high-pitch sound echoed softly in the motel's inner courtyard and Cano came back with a huge, metallic hubcap clenched between his teeth. Derek told him to let it go, then he tried to pull it from his maw without much success. The dog circumvented his master and dropped the piece of shiny metal at Cameron's feet. She accepted the tribute, crouching to caress the soft fur behind his pointy ears and for a split-second, she felt she was somewhere else, kneeling in gravel, underground. A lone bulb would hang shakily from the concrete ceiling and cast flickering lights and shadows on her thin hands. She was petting the fluff on her bitch's neck and a distorted voice filled the tunnel… Cameron blinked and she was back in the motel. She would remember strange things, sometimes. What disturbed her the most was that she didn't know if the memory was hers.

"And you should not encourage him," was grumbling Derek, oblivious to her change in demeanor. "You can't imagine the mountain of crap he brought back from the woods. Rabbits and squirrels and birds and this one time, a _goddamn _beaver. The thing was bigger than him."

"It's a gift," said Cameron, glancing up at Derek. "I don't get many of those."

"Have it your way."

Cameron set down the hubcap solemnly on the truck's backseats and she came to sit behind the wheel. Soon enough, they were eastbound on the turnpike. A red sun was emerging from the horizon and it revealed the light shade of electric-blue lying behind Cameron's doe eyes. She was pushing the truck's engine to its limit and the barren landscape had coalesced into a hundred-and-twenty-miles-per-hour blur.

"What did she want?" asked Derek from the passenger's seat. He had came out of another drooling, shallow sleep. Cano was making dream noises on the backseats, brooding the hubcap.

"To meet," answered Cameron.

"To meet and do what?"

"She says she has news on the jumpers."

"You sure it was her?"

"White queen takes pawn and black queen takes knight," she said, matter-of-factly.

"Doesn't make no sense."

"I didn't invent the code."

"Who did?"

"John," said Cameron, and she closed her eyes. She didn't need them, anyway. She was looking for something else. She focused her perception on electromagnetic waves. If you were human, it would be a weird thing to say. Cameron was not human. To her, it was like ripples in a pound and it was like a web, woven strand by strand and unwoven thread by thread, over and over. Some strands were pink and sharp and some threads were flat and silent. Some were just two-dimensional shapes, others were a dissonant rattle.

She ignored Derek's bear hand trying to seize control of the steering wheel, and she ignored his laments on the prospect of dying next to a _glorified inanimate doll_. She overtook an eighteen-wheeler blindly and pulled back to avoid a sedan propelled on the opposite lane and Derek cursed the god of monotheists. Then, Cameron felt it. On the other side of the flat hill. It distorted radio waves like a boulder would split a torrent apart. She stepped hard on the brakes and brought the Dodge Ram to a more tranquil, _legit_ speed… they crossed paths with a police cruiser a few seconds later. Cameron put half a mile between them and the white-and-blue vehicle to floor the throttle anew, nearly doubling the speed limit. She did that on and off for three hours, avoiding all patrols. She couldn't do much about satellites, though, but they probably nursed little interest in their earthly wanderings. Cameron stifled the urge to _blend_ into the earth's magnetic field, which was always so slow and soothing, like a shallow rill softly gargling around your ears. Derek's bemoaning drifted to her and the words began to take comprehensible shapes.

"What?" she asked.

He sighed. "I said _three_ times: are you dead and where are we gonna meet Connor."

"The Four Corners."

"The _four_ corners of what?"

"The only place in America where four states meet. Colorado, Utah, Arizona and New Mexico. It's a monument. And no, I'm not dead."

"What's so important, out there?"

"Nothing. It's just a nice place to meet."

"Fair enough. Can we take a break, now?"

"Is that your mammalian thing?"

"Yes. And the gauze is soiled. It's starting to smell, I think."

Cameron opened her eyes and the world became bright pain when the light spectrum bumped into the warm backwash of the telluric magnetism. Derek was slumped in the cushioned seat. He was a bit pale and had purple shadows under his eyes. The bruise her collar bone had left on his cheekbone was still spreading, taking unnatural colors. She steered the truck and let it lose its speed naturally on the curved exit. The land was sandy and dry and flat hills were uniformly covered with brown grass and thorny bushes.

"Look," he said, pointing at a weathered, green sign. "We're in the Mojave National Preserve. Kyle and I made a trip there when we were children… not much to see, just rocks and sand. Then Connor sent me back for some seek and destroy."

Cameron nodded. "Skynet will build a labor camp, here."

"Guess we can blend in, then. That's the right place for a human and a machine," he said grimly.

"Yes. And I have my feather-earrings." She gracefully swayed her head sideways to rustle the big, rainbow-colored feathers resting on her shoulders. "I got them at a Native American arts and craft fair. It's tight, right?"

"You're a bit odd."

"What bit?"

"_Huh_… all of them bits, woman."

"Thanks."

"This was no compliment."

"Oh. Thank you for explaining."

"Eyes on the road."

* * *

James Ellison kept his eyes on the road and his bleeding feet. He couldn't do much more than that. He walked along the shade cast by the houses and pedestrians would stop and stare at him. He was on the verge of collapsing but he kept on going. The clothes he had found were torn and he had to drink stagnant water from the storm and he felt the diarrhea coming. He was old and weak but he _endured_, clutching on his faith and his memories. _It's a test_, he told himself, _and I'm worthy_. His head and arms were wobbling to their own flaccid rhythm as he staggered down Bellehaven Avenue and he repeated the words like a mantra. _Find the Connors. Survive. The house with the salamander on the wall._

The heat was unbearable and his vision became blurry and James fell on his knees. A rugged hand came to rest on his shoulder and he blurted out in the blinding light, "What day is it?" But the man didn't answer. James whispered his mantra as he felt darkness clutch him. "The house with the salamander. The Connors must survive."

* * *

Cameron and Derek stopped at Barstow, County of San Bernardino, California. The place looked like all the places that stood on the side of Road 66: white, ocher and yellow buildings sprouting at random from a thin coat of sand and the sandy rock beneath. They refilled the gas tank and drove slowly down Main Street.

"I think my men and I camped there for a night," said Derek Reese. He tapped the window and pointed at a vintage-looking store: the _One Groove_. "The place still had some record players. We plugged one of them to the generator in the truck and listened to Marvin Gaye and – _fuck_!" Derek collapsed beneath the window when they drove past a lone police cruiser.

"Don't worry," said Cameron. "We have a common vehicle with a common paintwork. And I changed the plates."

"You did,_ huh_?"

"Yes. I had a spare."

"Well, it's my face I'm worried about and we don't have a spare for that, do we?"

"You haven't come up on the news channels or the precincts' database."

"Is that so?"

"It is so. I checked last night, on the computer. I also changed your teeth," she added, glancing at him.

He sat back upright and probed his jaw tentatively. "Wot?"

"Your dental identification. One of the killers from the club was a former Seal. You were of same stature and I swapped your records with his."

"Some Seal, _huh_?" chuckled Derek. "Got beheaded by a ninety-pound girl." Then he breathed out slowly, pensive. "So, let me get this straight," he said. "They got six dead bodies, three of them decapitated, all of them charred or just piles of ashes, either killed with unregistered guns or a freaking sword. And I'm one of those bodies, now."

She nodded curtly, making her hair and feathers move gently. "Yes," she said, "and it's not a _freaking_ sword. It's a Wakizashi blade. A traditional Japanese sword. Did you cover your tracks for the cabin?"

"It's not even registered. I gave a false address for the gig at the King Jack's."

"Then, as far as the police is concerned, you will be soon tossed into a mass grave without any next of kin to shed a tear over your charcoal remains."

"Sounds like good news, somehow."

Cameron made a turn right and parked the Dodge Ram between two smaller sedans, facing the front window of a diner (this one was not a Denny's, it was a Holly's.) She keyed off the ignition and swiveled in her seat to retrieve something in the backseats: a red pouch with a white cross on it. Derek unbuttoned his shirt and tensed up when Cameron removed the gauze; he insulted her when she applied a foamy disinfectant on the flesh wound. The compartment of the Dodge Ram was spacious enough that wrapping the new dressing around his body didn't require too much proximity between them, which he seemed to be at odds with, but still, he complained about the feather-earrings tickling him at some point.

"So, how does that work, exactly?" he prompted.

"What do you mean?" asked Cameron, overlapping the strips of bandage; she began to knot the two ends together and Derek winced.

"I mean the cops, the road. You shut your eyes and you can tell where is the next patrol."

"I don't _see_ the way you do."

"You don't say. It's like, what, a mindfulness shamanic trance or echolocation?"

"I'm not a bat. I can feel electromagnetic waves, though. Cops have a telltale, they're all linked via the same radio frequency. They form a web. The cruisers are tangled knots and between each knot, there is a strained rope. It tells me where they are."

"I don't get it."

"It's like a shamanic trance. I'm done."

Derek dropped the subject and buttoned up his Hawaiian shirt. Cameron left her sword hidden beneath her seat when they exited the car.

"Look at that dog," said Derek, "all he does is sleeping. Did you slip him some pills or something?"

"No," she lied. "He's _deficient_, remember?"

"And they say dogs grow like their masters."

Cano left the car clumsily but soon enough, he was back to his natural self, marking his territory on several rims and releasing the full content of his bladder against a streetlamp. Cameron had given him a home-made brew of soporific compounds so he would like her and mostly, keep quiet. She had done the same with Reese when she had removed the bullet from his stomach; still, the man was diametrically opposed to the concept of quietness. And for the liking-her part, she was not really expecting it.

The atmosphere was heavy and dry and the tarmac radiated heat so they entered the air-conditioned diner hastily. It was the middle of the day and the place was crowded, which they didn't mind: hiding in plain sight was a habit, if not a creed. Derek had to leave Cano leashed to a rail under the shade of a porch and they sat at a booth against the front window where both dog and master could see each other. The waitress came to take their orders.

"You know," he said when the woman departed, "we had a bitch that looked just like him back in 2027. She was a fine scout. And when I saw him in the kennel, I thought that he might be her grandfather or something."

"It's very unlikely the bitch is related to Cano," said Cameron. She would pronounce the dog's name wrong and it sounded like _canoe_.

"It's stupid, right?" mused Derek, staring blankly at his dog through the window. "Still clinging onto the past."

They remained in contemplative silence for a few minutes before Cameron said, "I'm no Nancy Drew."

He turned back toward her. "Come again?"

"I looked it up: she's a detective. I'm no Nancy Drew. I couldn't track down the jumpers."

"Well, you found the men that wanted to kill me, looks like fruitful investigation to me. Got something on'em?"

"Not much, old contracts and sham addresses."

"Mercenaries?"

"Maybe."

"What a random happenstance, _huh_?" he asked in mock bewilderment.

Cameron shook her small, feather-ornamented head. "Not random. They knew you would be at the King Jack's. In this time."

"What about you?" he continued. "Radio silence for six years and you show up in the nick of time."

"Random happenstance."

Derek snorted and chuckled. "You couldn't play poker to save your life, girl. You have a tell when you lie. John told me about it a long time ago, and I get it, now."

Cameron parted her lips slightly and the waitress came back to their booth with a large tray. She set down Derek's dish, which was red meat with fries and a Dr Pepper's can, and she gave Cameron a tall tumbler of fresh water, which she drank in one big, inhuman gulp, spilling a quarter of it on her black attire.

"That much swallowing was unnerving to see," stated Derek, chewing on his rare steak.

"It's for my back. I need to heal."

"Will it scar?"

"Not much. It will be over in a few days."

He nodded in a way that might have meant _good _or _I don't really care_. He ate his meal in silence until Cameron closed her eyes and stood still and he complained about her posing as a _glorified doll_, again.

Then, it happened between two _ticks_ of a single heartbeat. For humans, it would be a split-second or so; for Cameron, it was a small eternity. Derek's heart made the first _thump_ when blood gushed through his arteries and veins… the place was swarming with noisy humans, chewing, laughing and talking. In this hurly-burly, some were young, others were old, and most of them were in between. The coffee maker gargled and the frying table sizzled and outside the diner, Cano was breathing loudly, his tongue hung loose to cool down his furry body. On Main Street, tires scratched the hot tarmac with a rasping sound and beyond that stood tall buildings, their foundations making hollow creaks against the dusty wind. And standing on the roof of a tenement… _something_. Something _metal_. Something still and not breathing.

In Cameron's opinion, human weapons were flawed. Well, you could still argue for pros; for instance, a bullet could travel at three times the speed of sound, which rendered dodging said bullet a particularly complex endeavor: it always arrived before you could hear the discharge. However and if you were paying close attention, you could hear the safety pin being lifted off and the bones in the fingers cracking as they pressed the trigger. And Cameron heard it. Derek's heart made the second _thump_ and Cameron dove to the ground, taking him with her when the front window and the leatherette seat exploded in a hail of red fabric, white foam and plywood. The second bullet turned their table into thousands of splinters and chaos ensued. The world became noise and the customers moved in one wave of screaming flesh, ducking behind the furnishings. A bullet caught a lone woman in the head: it vanished from reality in a gush of blood and skull fragments.

"What's happening?" shouted Derek over the mayhem and the shrieks of fear. Bursts of gunfire came in response and mowed down patrons at random.

"Time to go," said Cameron

They crawled over the tiled floor and behind the counter. Another burst splattered blood and innards on the walls and Cameron crouched on Derek's back and buried his head under her arms to prevent him from being squashed by the human stampede that followed. They sprang to their feet and took an erratic path through the kitchen and toward the diner's back entrance. They bolted through the kitchen's exit and into the dazzling light. The panicked crowd dispersed like a flock of crows in the back parking lot and the valley echoed the deafening sound of the rifle like the low rumble of thunder. Cameron and Derek went around the diner with their backs to the concrete wall until they reached the corner and got a line of sight on the tenement across Main Street. People were running hectically to their cars or to random places to avoid the hail of bullets. Some were cradling wounded infants in their arms. Cameron saw the madman with the seven-foot tall rifle in one hand, a Uzi in the other, standing on the edge of the tenement's rooftop, then leaping into the air. The sixty feet drop made him land heavily on his feet, cracking the asphalt under impact.

"_Metal_," hissed Derek. "Do you know him?"

Cameron shook her head and the unknown cyborg strolled across Main Street with his huge rifle propped on his shoulder. He was struck and sent sprawling on the tarmac by a sedan and Cameron and Derek took their chance to run toward their truck.

"_Fuck_!" hissed Derek. "Where's Cano?" The rail where they had left the dog and the front window above it were gone into shards.

Cameron tossed him the car keys. "I'll find him. Make a turn and meet me in the back," she ordered then hopped into the ravaged insides of the diner.

She dodged patrons staggering in the bloody remnants of the room and stepped over mauled bodies, some missing limbs, others having only limbs remaining. She jumped on the counter to take an encompassing look at the diner… and all went black when she heard the discharge and the armor-piercing round struck her in the back. She went flying above the counter to crash into the tiled wall.

* * *

The voices were coming at random. _Is that him? _James felt a shiver ran up his body and something throbbing in his arm. Shadows were fussing and talking and merging together. _Can I touch him? No, Savannah, not now_. His throat filled up with liquid and he turned his head to vomit something brown on a parquet floor. A sharp light was shoved into his eyes.

"You're gonna be fine, James," shouted a man over him. "Leave him be for a sec, 'kay?"

"The drawing. Sarah Connor," he murmured through parched lips. "The Connors must survive."

Everything was _so_ bright. A face came into focus and James remembered a man, thirty years ago, throwing the Holy Bible in a grave. It was all he knew before the world became void and silence.

* * *

Cameron felt white noise and she blinked to see a blurred world tainted in red. She was being dragged by the wrist over the floor and into the kitchen, bumping into the greasy inox furnishings. Her spine had been hit and she couldn't move. She was hauled over something _mushy _and a second later, she was back on the hot tarmac under the blinding sun.

"_Shit_!" shouted a man.

Derek Reese appeared above her. He lifted her and stuffed her roughly into the backseats of the truck. Glass was shattered and the truck's frame was riddled with rounds when Derek threw himself back into the driver's seat and floored the throttle. The truck raced forward and the door slammed itself shut when he swerved sharply to avoid a motorbike. The rear windshield exploded and buried Cameron under thousands of gleaming shards. Derek ducked behind the wheel and shouted "_fuckfuckfuck!_" and he hurtled the truck blindly into a nondescript street. Cameron could only feel the car accelerating furiously on the asphalt then making a sharp turn on a dusty road.

"You okay?" yelled Derek over the roar of the engine, checking her in the rear view mirror. "_Shit_! He's gaining on us!"

He veered into the flat and barren land and drove at high speed for ten minutes, crushing bushes and making random turns on the bumpy terrain until he stepped hard on the brakes just behind a rocky embankment. Cameron's body was shoved harshly on the carpeted floor by the rapid change in speed, then the door was opened and her face came crashing in the sand when she was dragged out of the compartment by the ankles. Her tank top was ripped by rugged hands and she felt something _twisting _and _tweezing _in her lower back.

The thrum of an engine approached and Derek swore an unknown spectrum of insults including _circumvent_ and _neural_ and _bitch_, then something _cold_ was removed from her back and Cameron gasped when her body arched backward. She felt the collateral system in her spine slowly regaining control. The flank of the truck was riddled with short bursts and Derek ducked and rolled under its frame for safety. Cameron crawled to the driver's side and grasped the handle of her sword from under the seat before she was snatched from the ground by the nape of her neck and hauled roughly over the gas tank of a motorcycle. The ground became blurry again with the acceleration but she managed to thrust her elbow into the gas tank, stopping the bike dead in its tracks in a gush of boiling gasoline, sending them crashing and rolling in the sand.

They both got up, facing each other in the cloud of dust that was slowly drifting away. Cameron didn't know the machine, but he was two heads taller, two _Camerons_ larger and his right foot lacked a boot… she could barely stand on her own feet, right now. The hand of the machine sprang forward and hit her in the armpit when she tried to unsheathe her sword and his large foot struck her midsection. She flew backward with the sword and he was on her in less than a second, pinning her to the ground with one hand. The machine took a switchblade from his jeans and shoved it in her skull, just above her CPU bay. Cameron tried to stretch her arm and fingers; she could almost touch the handle of the sword. She felt the flap of skin being removed and the metal cap popped out of its socket. She felt the end coming… and Cano came sprinting and leaped on the machine's arm in a hail of bared teeth. The sudden impact sent the cyborg sideways and Cameron took her only chance to roll on her belly and grip the sword's handle.

She unsheathed the blade in one furious motion, turning over on her back, and a head came flying across the air, ending its course rolling inside a thorny bush. Cano was still unleashing his wrath on the beheaded machine, dragging it and tearing large chunks of flesh in his angry maw.

Cameron lay still, panting and staring blankly at the sun. Something wet and slimy investigated her ears and tires squealed next to her. Derek's head appeared iridescent between her and the zenith sun and his face came slowly into focus when he began to lift her by the armpits into a sitting position.

"I can move," she said with an electronic-tinted voice.

"_Fuck_…" He dropped and sat heavily on the ground and wiped the perspiration from his face. "What was that?"

"I don't know. Triple-eight. Foe." Then, "I'm sorry. You said no decapitation."

"I'll let this one pass." He picked up and put the sword on his lap, puffing from the exertion. "_Shit_, what is that made of?"

"Solid tungsten."

"I thought you were down, earlier," he said. "I found Cano in the back of the diner but he just ran back into the _goddamn_ kitchen."

She turned weary eyes to him. "He was the one dragging me?"

"Yes."

"And he saved me from the cyborg, again."

"Did he? I couldn't see, you guys got too far on the bike and the dog just kept chasing."

Cano came back to them dragging the severed head of the machine by a torn ear. He dropped the head next to them as an offering and sat dutifully next to it.

Cameron made a faint smile. "He's not so deficient at chasing metal, after all." Then she placed a soft hand on Derek cheek. "The master is not so deficient, too. Thank you."

He shrugged off the hand. "So, we're square, now."

She cocked _the _eyebrow. "You still owe me one," she said. "Kaliba's warehouse. Six years ago."

"I had it under control."

"You were tied to a chair for interrogation…"

"Full control."

"… then termination."

"And you were afraid I'd spill my guts."

"No guts to be spilled. Sarah had given false coordinates: 33-42-31 north. The desert."

He nodded ruefully. "She ditched me."

"Sarah ditched _us_."

"What do you mean?"

"We haven't met in six years."

Derek chuckled. "Well, this is gonna be _fun_."

"I doubt it. I got thermite in the truck's bed."

"I saw the can." He got up wearily. "Let's melt this fucker to the ground quickly. We gotta make the rendezvous."

"Burn the body." She scratched gently Cano's ears. "We keep the head."

* * *

When James woke up again, he was alone. _No_, not really. A tiny hand was resting on his chest. He turned toward freckles, puffy eyes and red hair.

"Savannah?" he croaked. She noticed him and her eyes became wide and she left in a hurry.

She came back with two men. One was young and few inches taller than the other, a man in his late forties. He was checking his pulse on the side of his neck and James recognized the rugged hands. It was Charlie Dixon.

"You okay, James?" he asked. "It's fine, you're fine." He grabbed his hand gently. "Don't scratch that, it's just saline. You were severely dehydrated."

"I need to get up…"

They got him in a sitting position and he threw up some murky liquid in a bucket they had prepared. He was sitting on wooden table and he winced at the light coming from the window. The two men were holding him by the shoulders and Savannah was nervously twisting her fingers at the far end of the table. A new shape came into focus…

"Where is Sarah Connor?" asked James.

"Away," said the young man. He already had the rough face of his future-self, minus the scars. John Connor.

"I have a message," rasped James. "For her."

"How did you find us?"

"He told me. I'm the only one to know. I swear."

He asked for a sheet of paper and a pen and they fetched the stuff for him. His hands were trembling but he began to draw, anyway. He had imprinted the picture in his mind and he was afraid it might vanish into thin air if he didn't put it down on the sheet of paper, right now. John and Charlie were still holding him by the shoulders and the paper was on his lap. James drew a big square and he tried to put, as neatly as possible, seven horizontal lines and seven vertical lines within it, evenly spaced to form a 64-tile square. Then, on each corner of the square, he drew two pieces, one black, one white. When he was done, he gave the sheet of paper to John with a shaky hand and he was lain back on the table.

The young leader looked at the drawing, puzzled. "What does it mean?"

"I don't know," said James. "I was told to give you that."

"Is that a riddle?"

"He said it was a code."

"What is this, John?" asked Charlie.

John took back the paper and paced back and forth, staring intently at the drawing. "Looks like an _eight queens problem_, it's a mathematical thing… that's how you place queens on a board so they don't attack each other. It's just a riddle."

"No…" murmured the blond girl. She took the drawing from John's hands. "That's the Four Corners."

"What do you mean?"

Her eyes were wide and she was stuttering. "The Four Corners. It's an engraving."

"Explain yourself," hissed John.

"I saw that when I was… I don't know, twelve, maybe thirteen years old. It's on Sarah's tomb," she said. "It's a shrine, it's a pilgrimage for us. We all do it. We come to see her tomb and that thing's engraved on it. It's called the Four Corners." She tapped her finger on the drawing. "That's all I know."

"White and black queens meeting at the Four Corners," whispered John. "Does it mean anything to us?"

Charlie Dixon sighed. "I think it does, son. I'm sorry."

"What are you talking about? Where is my mother?"

Charlie took a cellular from his back-pocket and flipped it open. "Rook checks king," he said.

* * *

**Author's note: **A bit of Cameron's vantage point and perception.  
Coming up next: **Chapter Six: the Four Corners**, last installment of **Part One**.

Just send me a "nice" in the reviews if you like it or criticize it at length.  
See you in the world.  
Wakong


	7. Part One, Chapter Six

**Author's note: **I do not own the characters, the space-time continuum, etc. Main characters: Cameron, John, Derek and Sarah. And a bunch I will not divulge, here.

**Summary: **The story is set six years after the events of Today is the Day (part two) and so we jump over the fate of Derek, Cameron and John. Sarah ditched Derek and Cameron, hiding John in the lighthouse with Charlie Dixon. She felt that Jesse's treason was Derek's, and that Riley's murder was an omen. An omen from _their _kind, an omen from Cameron's true nature. The four of them never reunited and six years have passed since 2008. A storm gathers, and in the eye of the storm stands a girl from the future, Cameron. Space and time have been stretched between her and John. She will travel with unexpected companions on an unexpected journey to find her way back. Heads and arms will be severed, Derek will wear Hawaiian shirts and the strands of time will be woven and unwoven.

* * *

**CROSSING LINES**

**PART ONE**

**THE FOUR CORNERS**

* * *

**CHAPTER SIX**

**IN WHICH THE QUEENS MEET AT THE FOUR CORNERS**

* * *

Richard Gray stood in many places simultaneously. He had his feet on each side of the bronze disk marking the virtual area where the four states met. It had been a hot day, a 120-Fahrenheit day, and he had only seen a few tourists interested enough in having their feet overlapping four American states to bear with the suffocating heat. The nine flags – two for each state and one US flag – sat still in the air. Each state had its own spacious quadrant made of concrete with benches and a porch that lined the periphery. Gray came to seat under the porch of New Mexico's quadrant, drenched in sweat. He sat on a wooden bench at the right end of the porch and was alone for a while in the scorching shadows. Some kids were taking pictures of their feet in the center of the monument and soon enough, they were gone. A man made his way behind the rocky pillars and beneath the porch. He was tall with sandy hair and a sandy complexion. Like him, he was dressed in civilian clothes and Gray preferred it that way. He was not willing to endure the arid weather in combat fatigues… the desert was already a sufficient, vivid reminder of Iraq. He sat behind a desk, now, and he was aiming for a bigger desk. Gray wrinkled his nose in disgust. The man reeked of perspiration and piss.

"What's up with this place?" asked the man. "Can't they meet in an air-conditioned building?"

"The place is flat," said Gray. "No spot for snipers. It's a bureaucratic conundrum, too: can't put a drone or a chopper up there unless you have the consent of the four states."

He chuckled. "Crafty bitches, _huh_?"

Gray despised the man, already. He was just another adrenaline junkie, another beat veteran with balls two times bigger than brains. When it came to the Connor woman and the girl, the slightest _faux pas_ could end with charred bodies.

"One of them _bitches_ cut down six of ours in Seattle," stated Gray. "You should show respect."

The man grabbed his crotch. "I'll show her some _respect_, all right. The boss needs her head. Didn't say anything about the body. Anyway, _sir_," he added, "you shouldn't be alone in the field. Our contact is here. He's waiting for you in the car." And the man departed in the dazzling light.

Gray bit the inside of his mouth. _Shit_. He was getting claustrophobic in the truck and the idea of being trapped in it with their _contact_ released butterflies in his stomach… not the pretty, bright-colored kind of butterflies. The boss had said they were dangerous men. Cold-blood killers. He grabbed a smoke, drew on it quickly and neatly crushed the butt under his heel. He made his way out of the monument. The men were in place: on the benches in the open, under the shade of the porches or pacing up and down the concrete lanes. Gray stepped into the rear of a black Humvee and breathed relief when the cool air of the compartment gushed under his armpits.

The man with the sandy face was on the passenger's seat, cleaning and greasing his handgun. The driver was a younger, white man with black eyes and a shaven head. He looked flustered. Gray remembered from the file that his name was Robert, but he wasn't sure. The man sitting next to him, though, Gray had never seen. He was built like a Coke machine with bright blue eyes and short-cropped blond hair. He sat still, not breathing, not blinking, and Gray immediately regretted the crushing heat outside the Humvee. He tried to compose himself.

"Where is the other one?" he asked, stammering a bit.

The humongous man turned inexpressive eyes toward him. "Alexander didn't make the rendezvous. He's a mad dog. He likes the hunt. Doesn't work well with humans."

It was a _strange _thing to say, thought Gray. "So, you're Cargo," he said and the man nodded. "I was told you had encounters with the targets, before. You know their _modus operandi_."

"I know that they will meet here."

"Who's your informer? We've been looking for the Connors and the girl for years."

"It happened before." He opened the thick file on his lap and skimmed through it. He tapped a sausage-like fingertip on one of the photograph. "You lost Reese," he stated.

"Reese? He goes by the name of Fields, now. We lost him in Seattle."

"The girl helped him."

Gray nodded. In his opinion, Fields, or _Reese_, was a low-life. He'd been running solo for three years getting small-time gigs in the state Washington, and most of them were legit, anyway.

"What's his purpose in this?" asked Gray.

"He knows a lot. And he's a good lure. The girl will always save him. She's a skin-lover." Cargo spat the word _skin_.

"If he had intel on her, she could have executed him. The girl's a regular Hannibal Lecter. The Seattle PD thinks he's dead: his dental records were flagged."

"And you don't believe that," stated Cargo.

Gray shook his head. "We had six men on the job. The precinct wrapped and mailed six bodies to the coroner. Well, six bodies, two heads and a scalp. The girl's a savage."

Cargo flipped the pages of the file. He ran his fingers on one of the photographs with reverence. "She's a queen, Richard Gray. Your _kind _cannot understand that."

Gray gulped nervously. Cargo was looking at a black-and-white picture. It had been taken in a dusty, wooden building filled with benches and the girl was dressed in a simple white dress.

"The picture's outdated," said Gray. "She's cut and dyed her hair blond." Cargo was looking intently at her, and Gray added, "It's from her wedding. We understand she kept her husband's name."

"What is it?"

"Cole."

"Interesting."

"Hardly. The guy's dead and it's a common name."

Cargo turned toward him and produced some sort of a smile. It resembled a ugly scar, actually. He had a _proper _scar on his jaw, showing a shiny material underneath, like a mandible prosthesis. "I meant, you Grays are interesting," he said. "You always bring us the most tiny details."

Gray didn't know what he meant by that. A radio spat statics in the front of the truck.

"Call incoming," said Sandy on the passenger's seat. He handed them two plastic pieces attached to the radio with curly wires. White noise was followed by a woman voice, crackling.

"_White queen takes pawn_."

A second female answered, "_Black queen takes knight_."

"_Got news from the rook. Where are you?_"

"_Eastbound on the 40_."

"_Are you being followed?_"

A pause. "_Not now. We had a jumper on our tail, though._"

"Alexander," hissed Cargo. He leaned over and pressed a button on the radio. They were all shocked into silence when he interrupted the line and spoke in the mouth-piece with Sarah Connor's voice, "Okay. We maintain the rendezvous. You'll seat under Utah's porch and wait for my call."

"_Copy that, white queen. Where will you be?_"

"New Mexico's porch."

"_Thank you for explaining… oh, I forgot._"

"Yes?"

"_How's Wolfy?_"

"Wolfy's fine."

The line went dead abruptly. Cargo crushed the mouth-piece in his huge hand. "We've been made," he growled. "They made us."

"What the _fuck_ was that?" snarled Sandy. "The plan was to get _both _of them. You broke the line and you fucked up the code. Connor's a paranoid freak, she won't come near –"

Cargo's hand snapped the passenger's seat headrest, bending the thing and Sandy's head at a right angle. His spine made the sound of broken twigs.

"Only the girl matters," said Cargo in the deafening silence that followed.

"_Ohfuckfuckfuck_," muttered the driver.

Gray was frozen in his seat; his mouth opened and closed itself several times but no sound would come out.

"Get your men back into the vehicles and gear up," ordered Cargo. "We'll find the girl on the interstate. Let's hunt."

* * *

"Get the wheel," said Cameron. Derek grabbed it and maintained the course while Cameron slid into his seat and he did the same with hers.

"What was that?" he uttered, stepping on the gas pedal to regain speed.

"We've been made," she answered. "That's what Sarah wanted to tell me. They are waiting for us at the Four Corners."

"And who are _they_? The same guys that wanted me in Seattle?"

"I think so," said Cameron. "They have a cyborg with them, this time."

"Are you sure?"

Cameron nodded. "Voice mimicry. I asked about Wolfy."

"What does that mean?"

"John's dog back in 1995. When I asked about Wolfy, Sarah should have known. The name of the dog was Max."

Derek cursed under his breath. "I'm getting to old for this. What's the plan, now?"

"Drive straight. They'll try to catch us on the road."

"Do you hear yourself, woman?"

She was the one bulletproof, here, and rushing headlong into a trap was a gross concept that was not coded in his genes.

"They'll get us if we leave the interstate," she said. "The others cars will hinder the chase."

"You want to use the civilians as _goddamn_ shields?"

"Trust me, Reese. And keep your head."

She opened the window and before he could shout an umpteenth _fuck_, she squeezed through the gap and disappeared from view. He heard a loud thump when she landed on the truck's bed.

"Keep your head, Reese," he muttered to himself. "Keep your head in order to… keep your head. Yeah, sounds about right."

Derek maintained the truck propelled at sixty miles per hour on the tarmac. He just wanted to burst through the side rail and bury himself deep into the desert, dig a hole somewhere and wait for the storm to pass. But he didn't.

"She knows what she's doing," he stated for his own sake, "The bitch knows what she's doing."

* * *

The smell was unbearable. Sandy's body was slouched against the window and his bowels and bladder had emptied themselves. Cargo still sat next to him. His head was bowed down and his eyes were closed. Gray told himself that it was his chance. His chance to slam open the door and roll out of the truck. He looked at the blurry road. They were dashing on the interstate at ninety miles per hour.

"I can't do that. I can't do that," he whispered to himself.

The driver had his hands clenched on the steering wheel, not daring to take his eyes off the road. They had glanced only once at each other in the rear-view mirror, and they both knew that the safest choice was to obey.

Gray's phone rang and he answered with shaky hands and a shaky voice. "Yes?"

"_Sir_," said a man, "_The target's ETA was 2030 at the Four Corners. We should run into them any minute, now. We need some intel on their vehicle_."

Gray turned around to look through the rear windshield. The three black vans were still following in their path and he found some comfort in this.

"I don't have the information, yet," answered Gray.

"_Your contact knows what he's doing?_"

Gray glanced nervously at the humongous, sleeping figure. He had said that he would _sense_ her, he would sense the girl as they approached her. Another day, Gray would have laughed and called him a dumb oaf. Right now, he was ready to believe every word that might come out of his mouth.

"He knows what he's doing," said Gray, and he hung up.

The young driver was now darting glances at him in the rear-view mirror. His face was drenched in sweat despite the air-conditioning.

"I heard Carl's voice," he said. He hadn't pronounced a single word during the last hour.

"It was him."

"We are approaching the target, right?"

Gray nodded and the boy exhaled slowly. "I can't do it, I can't do it," he murmured.

"Robert, is it?" And the young man nodded. "Keep your head, son," said Gray, maintaining a steady voice, but actually, he was close to shit his own self: their mission was to _ram_ into the girl's vehicle at high speed and send her spinning off the road.

Both men knew that such a collision would certainly squash their bodies into goo. Gray hated scratch tickets, but he was willing to take the small probability of surviving the frontal impact rather than disobeying Cargo.

The huge man opened his eyes. "One mile. Straight ahead," he said. "A common truck." He leaned over and put his hand on the steering wheel, maintaining a death-grip on it. "Just keep your foot on the gas pedal, human," he ordered.

"_Ohgod_ _ohgod_…"

The boy shut his eyes tightly and Gray couldn't do anything but stare at the road ahead. The land around them was merging into a blur at one hundred and twenty miles per hour. When he saw the truck on the horizon, he grasped the backseats and the truck's ceiling, trying to brace himself… then he saw her. Only for a second. She was standing on the roof of the truck with a rifle and some kind of sword strapped to her waist. The rifle was taller than she was.

Their windshield exploded and the compartment was splattered with Robert's blood and Gray felt inertia and gravity battled each other when they hit the rail and spun into the air. That was all he knew until they crushed on the ground and the world turned black and red.

* * *

The rifle roared above him and it made his ears throb painfully. Derek braked and veered abruptly to avoid the Humvee spinning out-of-control and a small human shape came crashing on the hood of the Dodge Ram. Cameron buried her fingers in the sheet metal in the last moment to stop her fall. Derek could only see her face and arms: the rest of her was hanging loose on the truck's nose.

"Watch out!" he shouted.

She launched herself forward on the hood and grabbed the wiper blades a split-second before Derek hurtled the Dodge Ram and burst the metal rail to avoid a black van dashing toward them. Cameron's body was shoved to the side by the sudden impact and the wiper blades she was grasping tore themselves out of the windshield. Derek floored the throttle in the arid land, engulfing them in a cloud of brown dust and he saw the shapes of three vans following his tracks. A burst of rounds struck their rear and Derek made a sharp turn. One of the bullets crossed the entire compartment and shattered the windshield.

"You gotta be kidding me!" he cursed.

Cameron was now hanging on the side of the Dodge Ram by her fingers. Derek ducked behind the wheel when another burst riddled the seats and the dashboard.

"_Fuck_!" He could hear Cano whimpering on the backseats. He was curled into a ball on the carpeted floor. "Hang on, boy!"

He drove deeper into the desolated landscape. The dust was surrounding them like a shroud and he heard tires squealed just behind him and he kept on going, shouting prayers and insults to unknown gods. Then he caught a glimpse of a revving shadow on his right, hidden in the cloud of dust… and Cameron disappeared. _Shit_. He bumped into something sharp and he felt a rocky, steady ground under the tires. When he saw Cameron again, he did not comprehend the situation right away: she was on the back of a black motorbike, sprinting ahead of him. The motorbike braked and made a U-turn in a trail of white smoke, then it bolted forward and crossed paths with him.

"What the –"

He could see them in the rear-view mirror: Cameron was grabbing the rider waist with one arm. With the other, she was lifting a hubcap as a shield, deflecting random bullets, then she threw it like a giant Frisbee and it penetrated the windshield of one of the vans. She unsheathed her sword and they drove straight toward the black vans. It was a _mad_ reenactment of jousting. Derek lost track of them and continued to propel the Dodge Ram forward. Another bike came at his side.

"You're hit!" yelled Sarah Connor behind the full face helmet and over the roar of the road.

He saw blood gushing from his shoulder. Sarah Connor grabbed the wheel, stabilizing the truck as they lost speed and came to a halt.

She opened the door and Derek tumbled out of his seat; she knelt and ripped his Hawaiian shirt open. Then she took something from her backpack: a long red tube.

"You got big, Reese," she said.

"And you look like a thigh bone," he mumbled.

"Got cancer."

"What was it?"

"Don't ask. Remitted."

"Niceties done, then. Just do it."

"I'm sorry for this," she said, then she lit the flare and stuck the flame in his shoulder.

She maintained him on the ground as she cauterized the wound and he dropped unconscious from the pain.

* * *

Gray crawled out of the wreck and spat foam and blood in the sand. The black skin of his hands was torn, like a purse turned inside out. He was lifted from the ground and came face-to-face with something he didn't really understand. It was a face. One half belonged to the _killer_, the humongous man. Cargo. The other half belonged to someone else. Or _something_ else. It was a piece of metal soiled with gore and sand and inside it, a red diode was gleaming. Gray felt a hot liquid dripping down his ankles as he pissed himself in terror.

The half-Cargo _thing_ swung him on his shoulder and marched forward. The sand changed into asphalt and Gray heard tires squealed, then the sound of broken glass and a pool of blood appeared between the huge feet of the monster. Gray was shoved into the backseats of a sedan and the vehicle bolted forward. They ran over something soft and mushy and soon enough, they had left the fuming Humvee behind and were driving toward the setting sun.

_You're alive_, thought Gray, and he started to weep uncontrollably. _You're alive_.

* * *

It was a new moon and the sky was a pool of dark ink speckled with billions of stars. Cameron could see behind it. She could see the shape of clouds bigger than the solar system and she could feel red giants collapsing in a burst of dying light and she could hear the rhythm of black holes dancing and merging.

She waved and an engine came humming behind her. Sarah Connor accelerated and stabilized the Honda to her level. They had improvised a harness with straps and tied Derek Reese to Sarah's back and around the bike's frame. Cameron grabbed his neck and gently slid her fingers beneath the helmet. She felt a steady pulse and she raised her thumb for Sarah to see. Charlie Dixon's bike, a huge Suzuki, was scouting the road fifty feet ahead. They had wrapped up and strapped Cano into a blanket and tied him to Charlie's back, a smaller, furrier version of Reese. The dog would take an occasional peek out of the blanket, spilling a fair amount of saliva on Charlie's shoulder, and Cameron felt she was fine. She was okay. She had kept everyone safe.

She rested her head on John's shoulder and stared at the sky. Sometimes, he would put his gloved hand on hers and Cameron would realize she was squeezing his midsection too hard, and she would release the pressure slightly. She didn't really need to have her arms around his waist, but she did it anyway. They hadn't spoke a single word since he had taken her from the Dodge Ram's hood onto the back of his Royal Enfield. They had slayed the men with guns and swords. Blood, bones and brain matter had soiled the sand. They had ridden with furious anger… and the men had met her. They had met _Hera_. They had met _Hela_. She was _war_ and she was _death_. She was a goddess in this barren land and they had witnessed her divine fury.

They had strapped Derek and the dog and drove a hundred miles inland before refilling the gas tanks. They had stopped on the side of the road to reattach Derek to Sarah's bike and make him drink some water. They made a halt in a vacant lot somewhere in the suburbs of Albuquerque and still, Cameron and John had not shared a single word. Charlie had dismounted and set Cano free. He was now helping Sarah removing the straps and the helmet off a groggy Derek Reese. He checked his wound and Derek shrugged off his hand. He wanted to walk on his own. John had put the kickstand and Cameron clutched onto him from behind.

"Come on!" yelled Sarah Connor, waving at them. "We need to burn the bikes and get going."

Cameron got off the leather seat and John did the same, massaging the insides of his thighs. They lit a flare and set fire to the bikes and the helmets with some remnants of thermite as a firelighter. Charlie Dixon mourned loudly the bikes and their searing fate and they left the vacant lot. Derek staggered a bit but shoved Sarah aside when she tried to help him. He didn't want to be touched by the woman just yet. His bravado faltered quickly and he put himself between Cameron and John, resting his arms on their shoulders and they walked along the quiet streets.

They finally arrived to the front porch of a nondescript house. A salamander was engraved on the side of the entrance. A young girl opened the front door and she hugged tightly Charlie, then Sarah and John. She ignored Derek and stood in front of Cameron, mouth agape. She hesitated for a split-second before wrapping her arms around her. She wouldn't let go, so Cameron lifted her slightly from the ground with one arm – the girl was a few inches shy from her height – and she entered the house. The redhead finally let go of her and Cameron made no comment when she saw Riley Dawson, even though she thought: _divergence_. She made no comment when she saw an old version of James Ellison standing precariously on his feet, carrying around a coat rack with a bag of saline strapped on it. She set down her backpack in the kitchen and Cano gnawed the fabric angrily, dragging the thing away. The dog knew what was inside and his wrath had not faltered. Not one bit.

Cameron stood still in the kitchen, watching the quiet street through the window. She was the sentry, always. People fussed and talked and cursed around her. James and Derek were left in the living room together, both of them linked to a bag of saline hanging on the coat rack. Charlie had put Derek under with a homemade cocktail of benzodiazepines diluted in whiskey (a blend from Tennessee), then disinfected his wound with hydrogen peroxide and sutured it neatly. Luckily, the bullet had made a clean path through his shoulder and avoided major blood vessels.

Cameron felt tension and anger. The young redhead was standing behind her with her arms crossed. She had proclaimed that no _blond bitch_ should approach Cameron and that, please, Sarah, leave her alone. And they all spoke between them and sighed in relief and hugged and rustled and they grew quieter and quieter.

Sarah and Charlie made their way upstairs, they became breathless for a few minutes and then they were calm. Derek and James slept top to tail in the large couch, the former convict and the FBI agent, virtually handcuffed together to the coat rack and the bag of saline. Riley went to sleep in one of the bedrooms and the young girl fetched a pillow and slept on the ground in the living room, a few feet from the couch. Cano came smelling Cameron and rubbed his snout in all kind of intimate places, which was a way of marking his territory and showing his happiness. Then he went into the living room, curled into a ball and slept with his head resting on Derek's hand, which was hanging loose from the couch. And for the first time in the last three days, the world was quiet.

A pair of arms came around her waist and a head rested on her shoulder. The arms had grown big and the head stood higher than it used to be and the stubble scratched the nape of her neck. He squeezed her _hard_ against his torso, resting his weight on her and she felt that he had gained nearly thirty pounds. His head lolled and he fell asleep several times.

"You're home," he finally said.

He let go of her and made his way upstairs. Cameron looked at the sky that was taking a soothing shade of pink. She smiled.

"I'm home."

* * *

**Author's note: **last installment. I don't know if I'll publish **Part Two**, it will depend on the feedback I get from this. I thank you all for reading my story.

Wakong


	8. Part Two, Chapter One

**Author's note: **I do not own anything related to the show. Main characters: Cameron, Derek, John and Sarah. James, Riley and Charlie and Savannah… and some more.

**Reviews' answers: **Thanks for the kind reviews and pointing out the typos in the first part (**Anticipation of new lover's**) – I learned English as an adult and it does not come naturally, sometimes.  
For the rising count of Favorite/Following buttons hit, I'm honored.  
To **easttexasfan**: I've been browsing fics on-and-off for the last ten years, so it means a lot. Thank you.

**Summary: **Cameron and Derek have found their way back home through blood and dust. The pawns begin to move in John Connor's big chess game… banks will be robbed. Hawaiian shirts will be worn. It will end in flames and sweat and some will show true grit.

* * *

**CROSSING LINES**

**PART TWO**

**WHITE KING**

* * *

**CHAPTER ONE**

**THE STORY OF A BLOND GIRL**

**AND A PREACHER MAN**

* * *

I already told you about the Golem of Prague and _el Viejo del Monte_ turned _simiesco_ by the gods. I never told you I read the Bible. You should know, by now, that I'm not calling it _holy_. It's just another tale we had in the forest. The one with Cain and Abel always bothered me, though: one _fucker_ killing the other and we don't know why, right? Cain's motives for murdering his brother are not explained, nor is God's reject of his sacrifice. So I _elaborated_. I told John it was not the story of a farmer killing a shepherd, no. I told him it was a metaphor, a mirror: the brothers were each other's reflection. Cain was _greed_ and _fear_ and it got the better of Abel.

The men would tell him a different story: _Cain is Bill Clinton and we are Abel_. They disfigured everything through the prism of communism, and I would tell John differently: _Cain will set fire to the sky and we are Abel, we are the shepherd. The world's fate depends on us._

* * *

I found her in the kitchen the next morning and I wished I'd put on some more clothes than a tank top and panties. The night had merged with figments of dreams and I'd almost fooled myself into thinking she wouldn't be there. I didn't care for Riley's bad omens and prophecies. If it wasn't Andy Goode's Turk, if it wasn't her, it would be something else. Skynet was a man. The greed and the fear of a man. And I could believe she'd changed, I saw Uncle Bob change before my eyes. I didn't care for what was underneath. Tell me John was a machine, tell me you were and I'd still love you to your last bone.

No, I cared about what she was: a _bitch_.

We had that crossbred and he was beautiful. Something between a German shepherd and a retriever, black and muscular. I would chase him and he would chase me and I loved him. He felt like a friend, he felt like family. One day, he bit a lump of flesh off my cousin's cheek and my dad put him down. We didn't take him to the clinic, no. He grabbed him by the collar and put a bullet in his neck. This was before my dad left us, of course. I wept so much at the time, but then I got it. He was a wolf, once. We mingled with his life, domesticated him. We put him on the wrong side of the leash, made him live with preys. He was a dog all his life, and for a split-second, the wolf came out and he had to be put down. It was our fault, really.

So I couldn't help but wonder why. Why was she here, unleashed? Cameron was a bitch. A she-wolf. Her place was either out in the wild, or put down in the ground.

"You're a bitch," I summarized.

She was standing guard in front of the window; the sky was pink and the air was still cool from the night. "I know, you've told me quite a few times," she said, then she turned toward me and declared, all matter-of-fact, "You're a bitch, too."

"Am I, now?"

"A lying bitch," she stated. "You didn't have news on the jumpers. You wanted to kill me, back at the Four Corners."

I did not feel like denying. "And yet, here you are," I said.

"Here I am."

_God_, that bitch could unhinge me real fast.

"You promised you would stay clear of us."

She tilted her head to the side. "I promised I wouldn't call John. I held up my end of the bargain. _You_ came for us."

"And now you're here," I sighed. "Blondy had an interesting piece of intel to share with us… about you, about what you'll do to us all. And I'm not sure I wanna take the risk. But the day is still young, right? I could kill you right now and go for pancakes. Make up for lost time."

"What was it?"

"What?"

"The piece of intel, about me. What was it?"

"Bad omens."

She arched an inquisitive eyebrow at me. "Worth killing me for?"

I shook my head, then I said, "You and I, we share something."

"John."

"That's Future-John, for you."

"And now they're almost the same."

"Perhaps. But I was talking about our feeling of mistrust for the girl."

She nodded. "Riley shouldn't be here. She died in our time and she shouldn't be here."

"I know. John told me the same thing."

"The timelines are diverging," she said, aloof.

"What does that mean?"

"Bad omens."

I grunted and went to the counter to make myself some coffee, or rather, what I liked to call coffee but was indeed a one-trip-to-the-bowels beverage, as my son liked to put it so aptly. Charlie would do it, being the early riser, but he hadn't been transferred to Albuquerque's ER, yet – for him, lies-ins were the rule, not the exception, and more so after the rough night we'd had.

"Let me," said Cameron when she saw me pour the ground coffee in the wrong compartment of the machine.

I observed her in silence, pale and blond in her bloody, black garments. She had gore and dust in her hair and I said, "You might wanna change." Then, to my own stupefaction, I added, "Bathroom's upstairs. My room on the right, clothes in the drop drawer. Don't wake Charles up."

She turned on the coffee maker, made a curt nod and left the kitchen. She stopped by the couch and checked something on Ellison's neck. She did the same with Reese. The man woke up with a cry and grabbed her wrist, then he calmed down and let her check his shoulder wound. She said something to him and he nodded and laid back his head on the armrest, his fingers weakly searching for his dog, curled on the rug next to him. Savannah was gone, carried upstairs by John in the early hours of the day.

The coffee maker hummed and gargled and I poured myself a small cup and I relished the fresh, fruity taste as she vanished upstairs, not making the slightest sound on the creaky steps.

* * *

Ellison did not kick the bucket, nor did Derek. I lost five bucks on this. We waited three days to remove the bag of saline and three days after that, they had recovered enough to eat solid food. Reese wouldn't let me tend to him, though, just his once nemesis, the Tin-Miss, and it was hard to bear such rejection, because the antibiotics Charlie gave him had messed _nastily_ with his bowels, and he'd lost that paunch and those chubby cheeks and he'd trimmed that beard and now, he just looked like a tarnished mirror where your image was reflected. Just like John's. Three more days and the world was back to normal.

We sat around the table the boys had lain James upon after he'd collapsed a hundred feet shy from the safe house, battered by the unforgiving sun. Riley looked good without the grime and the broken nails; the cartilage on her nose had mended, too. She was… flustered, though. I guess we could have shoved a bright light into her face, but that would have taken the interrogation scenery a tad too far.

Cameron had taken John's hand into her lap, caressing absentmindedly his thumb, and I pretended not to have seen that. She touched her lips to his ear, whispering something, and he nodded, gravely. She did the same with Derek but he didn't nod, he just kept his arms crossed above his chest with the sling on his right shoulder, staring me down. He was like a dog with a bone.

I sat at the far side of the table, mirrored by Charlie at the opposite narrow end, and I said, "Let's begin."

Charlie opened the bulging file in front of him with a sigh. He had to deal with waves of angry limbs when I grounded Savannah to her room: war councils were no place for her, yet. He pressed a square button on the tape recorder and the thing made an angry _clack_ when the cassette started to turn around the spools, humming a soft, scraping sound.

"That's…" He wrote in the file as he spoke. "War council of September the fifth, 2014. Let's start with Riley…"

"Dawson."

"We know that, girl. Now, tell us about your world."

She took a deep breath and started to talk, "It was hot, at first. The heat came right up from the ground and it was around 2020 that the radiation had faltered enough. By then, grass and moss had covered the cities and we could walk during daylight. The clouds were gone and we left the tunnels."

"What about the machines?" I asked.

"We had lots of them."

"What kind?"

"Terminators," she spat.

"What kind?" pressed John.

"Infiltrators. Eight-hundreds, triple-eights. Some were rubber-skinned. Some were _skinless_. I heard it was calmer in Africa, but I never left the country, because of the Krakens –"

I held up my hand. "What are those?"

"Deepwater machines," said Derek. "Huge. It's fifty-fifty when you take the sea."

"Like I said," continued Riley, "we had lots of machines. It was not safe outside the strongholds."

"You said that, before," said Charlie, and he drew a folded map from the file. "Yellowstone."

"Yes. In the mountains and down the river stream up to Saskatchewan. We were millions. We had scrubbed _metal _on our side, thousands of _them_. They would replace us for some tasks, like cleaning the latrines, draining engine coolants or dispose of the waste in Serrano Point."

"Looks like you guys didn't learn anything from our mistakes," I said. Ten years past the world's end and they already had machines doing their dirty laundry. Briefly, I thought of my dad and how he'd left us after losing his job at the mattress factory to a black and greasy machine.

"Well, most of them could replace a pulley or a pallet-truck, of course, but they were the frontline, mostly. They were killed instead of _us_. That's how they should be used and disposed of, right?"

She looked at me with expectancy on saying that, but I cut in, "You said Serrano Point, that's the power plant?"

She nodded. "We had reprogrammed tin-cans, but Skynet had ten times that amount. We lost Avila Beach and Serrano Point in 2027. It was the first battle for control over TDE."

"What's_ tee-dee-hee_?" asked Charlie, and I saw Derek's jaw clench and unclench in my peripheral vision.

"Time displacement. It was the new thing, the new arms race. The plant would provide enough energy to time jump."

"Who jumped?" hissed Derek through gritted teeth.

Riley made a sound that might have been a snort, might have been a chuckle. "This is above my paygrade. I was just a mechanic. I repaired axletrees and turbines, backstage."

"And John?" I asked.

"The war chief was injured and they got him into a chopper to Mexico City. It was the only place left with a working MRI."

I shaped my hands into white-knuckled fists. "How bad was he injured?"

"Not too bad, I guess. He came back unscarred. But he was… withdrawn, after that. Locked himself up in his quarters and played his big chess game from behind a desk. But this was no chess game, right? Machines were everywhere. Most were foes, like I said. And the rest…" She darted daggers at Cameron. "Some went bad. Took down bunkers and shelters. Killed a lot. We even had this _jumbo_ working with us in the workshop, we used him to _unbend_ damaged blades on reprogrammed Hunter-Killers. I mean, he could've gone bad, it could've been me. It had to stop."

"How?" asked John, grimly, though he already knew the answer.

"Your men came to find me and they brought me before you. You said… you said you knew me, that even, you loved me. I didn't get it but… it was important, you know?"

"What was?"

"The _evidence_," she spat and pointed a scornful finger at Tin-Miss. "She's the origin. She's Skynet. You showed me the files."

"You're lying," growled Cameron, low, and I heard John's phalanges painfully crack under the table.

"Why would I lie? You said it yourself. She was captured and they used her _goddamn _chip to build Skynet."

"Careful, now," advised John.

"You have to believe me," said Riley, plaintive, "it's the same as believing you."

"Future-me," he retorted.

"Aren't you the same?"

"I don't think we are."

We remained in cold silence for long minutes. John would glance at me, gauge me. He knew I wanted to claim Cameron's scalp, back at the Four Corners. He was waiting for me to weigh in and he was afraid of what I might say, but I declared, "Enough with blondy."

She sighed and asked with a small voice, "Are we done?"

"We've barely scraped the top of the iceberg, girl. Let's hear what the preacher man has to say, now. Fetch him on your way out."

She bowed her head and obeyed, silently, and Ellison came to sit in her stead. The man was now neatly shaven from his chin to the top of his skull. His skin was shiny and black and there was no telling if he was in his late thirties or early sixties. The fatigue and the brain fog of the time travel had evaporated and he could remember a good deal of his _past_, now. Still, he had to write some of it down on a sheet of paper.

"You're not in the girl's story," I said.

He cleared his throat and said, "I'll wager I'm not."

"Why is that?" I asked.

Slowly, he leaned over the table and grabbed his shirt's hem. He pulled on it to reveal something blurry, something black and flaky. It was a number on the nape of his neck.

"Spent my years buried under the hills in Topanga Canyon," he said. "Skynet Central."

"You survived the work camps?" asked Derek, dubious.

"Sort of." He turned toward Cameron. "Her _kind_ calls me a Gray."

The tape recorder crackled and missed a beat when Derek slammed his fist on the table. He sprang up on his feet, knocking his chair backward on the parquet floor. "You a _fucking _rat?" he snarled.

"You don't understand," said James, and he raised pale palms as a white flag. "I protected a machine, and this machine protected me in return."

Cameron placed a gentle hand on Derek's arm. He did not shrug it off. The man was going through every shade of crimson, right now, and the veins on his temples were about to pop. "Calm down," she said, and Derek breathed like an angry bull for a while and let out a final snort. He got his chair back on its legs and sat down heavily on it.

"What machine?" I asked.

"John Henry," he said, and all eyes around the table converged toward me. I darted a glance upward at the plaster ceiling, where Savannah's room should be. I hoped she was not listening to us with a homemade paper cup spying system. She had been young enough to forgive, but not to forget.

"What do you mean?" I hissed. "I napalmed the _metal _and the liquid bitch posing as Savannah's mother."

"He was displaced."

"Savannah told us he could not be moved," said John. "Told us he had a cable in the back of his head. That he could not leave the basement. He _was _the basement."

"We had found a way to move him," said Ellison, and I felt anger rise in my belly.

"What do you mean, _we_?" I asked.

"Weaver and I. We… split him up. No facility could sustain him, so we chunk him in bits and uploaded him to different locations. Hundreds of them. Weaver had dummy companies and also legit ones to hide him. He had already left when you came to burn down Zeira Corp. Weaver let you do it."

"I don't get it," said John. "It wasn't John Henry, no more. Just… subroutines and _daemons_."

James nodded toward me. "It was the only way, Sarah. The only way to preserve the two kings."

"What is that gibberish?" snapped Charlie. "What kings?"

"John and John Henry. They were supposed to be the kings. The ones that defeat Skynet."

"That's pure science-fiction," I surmised.

"He needed a chip to be whole again, and…" He pointed a finger at Cameron. "We provided him with hers. She was the only one able to sustain his _mind_."

"You captured Cameron?" murmured John, stand-offish.

"She came willingly," said James. "It was her answer to our question."

"What question?"

"_Will you join us?_"

Cameron's eyes became a bit wider and she _twitched_ ever-so-slightly. "You said enough, Mister Ellison," she whispered.

"You don't believe me?"

"I believe you said enough, Mister Ellison. I won't repeat it."

I growled and cut her off, "Enough! Who sent you back?"

"John Henry did. He made me learn the drawing. The 'Four Corners' drawing. He said it could save you. Save you both."

"Are you looking for redemption, preacher man?"

He shook his head. "I'm looking for the end. The end of the war."

I sighed and made a backhand gesture to dismiss Ellison. The cassette recorder purred softly in the silence that ensued.

"How could we know he's not scamming us, _huh_?" asked Derek. "How could we know he's not a _real_ Gray? He messed with us in the past, stealing Cromartie's body and whatnot."

"Reese has a point," I said. "Maybe we should leave his body to rot in the desert."

"He has more to say," declared Charlie. "Both of them. They're holding up information."

"To what end?"

"They're afraid of me," whispered Cameron.

"What?"

"They're afraid of me," she repeated, "afraid of what I might do to them."

Truth be told, I was scared shitless, too.

"Riley and James are mere pawns in this," cut in John, "Pawns don't have _agendas_, they follow. It's the king I don't trust…"

"What? John Henry?" I prompted. "The 'white king'?"

John shook his head and he said, stern, "No, _me_. Future-me."

"It's a fucking mess, all right," said Derek in order to sum up our current predicament.

"We need to find a clear path," I said, "we need to find and learn about the other jumpers. We have three of them. Well, two and a _head_. Another one was waiting for us at the Four Corners, right, Tin-Miss?" And she nodded. "We need to get into this head… John?"

"I will need material. High-end tech. His chip is coated with a phosphorous compound, I have to access him without opening the CPU bay or it will just go… _poof_."

"We'll get you the stuff," said Derek.

"And we'll need money," I added. "To prepare."

"We will rob banks," said Cameron, quietly.

"And what about our two strays?" asked John.

"We keep them," I answered, "for now. We still have a lot to figure out. We need to work as a whole." I glanced dully at Cameron on saying that.

"What does that make us, _huh_?" jested Derek. "A big happy family."

A big happy family, all right. We had James the preacher man and Derek the mercenary. We had John the hacker and Savannah the gifted child. Charlie the medic and Cano the scout and Riley, the whatever-she-was. We had me, captain of the eclectic crew, and we had _her_. Somehow, I couldn't fit her in that family model of Derek's. There would be a time to deal with Tin-Miss, a time to deal with the she-wolf. She kept too many secrets for my taste, but now was not the time.

We spent the rest of the day silent and grieving. We mourned the time of peace. We were at war, again. And it was going to be one _hell_ of a dogfight.

* * *

"Don't stand so close."

"You Grays should be protected. Soft meat, you are."

"It's just _Gray_, no plural."

They waited by the curb for a minute or so. Cargo's face had regrown in the past two weeks, but the skin still looked soft and baby-like. His eye was a pale shade of gray, now. The cab stopped and Gray leaned over to check the driver's face and sighed. It was the _third_. He wanted to say, _no_, _thank you, we'd rather walk_, but Cargo had lost patience and he shoved him onto the backseats. The compartment smelt of cold cigarettes and sweat.

"Where to?" asked the cabby, darting nervous glances at the humongous figure in the sun visor mirror.

"Corner of Monroe and Clark," said Gray.

"Got it."

"Just turn on the meter."

"I am. _Gee_."

The cabby told them it was a half-hour trip. It was always half-hour trips in this town and it did not depend on the distance you wanted to travel. Traffic jam just worked that way. Gray kept silent. He didn't like New York. The architecture was okay, and you'd see a lot of trees, but the people… Arabs and Puerto Ricans and the Irish. And Jews. He felt uprooted. Cargo paid the man when they arrived and he tipped well.

The buildings were square and stocky and lacked windows, like so many monoliths neatly ordered along the curb. They entered one of them through sliding doors. The hall was made of veinous and black, varnished marble and Gray felt more at home. People were dressed in black and they had white faces, or they were dressed in black and had they black faces, just the way it should be. They walked to the wooden counter standing in the middle of the hall.

"Mister Dyson?" asked Gray.

The secretary didn't look up and began tapping away at high speed on her keyboard. "Ten o'clock," she said, businesslike, then, "top floor, on your right after the elevator."

"I know."

Gray and Cargo took the stairs and they stopped when they reached the fourth floor.

"What are you doing?" asked Cargo.

"Waiting. It's five to ten."

"And?"

"The boss likes punctuality."

"_Bullshit_," uttered the machine, and he disappeared into the maze of carpeted corridors.

Gray followed him at a safe walking distance. Then he waited. He waited until his watched ticked 10 o'clock and he knocked on the door and entered. Dyson's office was sparsely furnished with a leather chair, a rich tartan rug and a large, oiled mahogany desk laden with files, photographs and two black laptops. Cargo was waiting by a plastic chair, standing upright and closer to the ceiling than any man should be. Another one mirrored Cargo and Gray gulped down nervously. He had the same face. The same blank face; he was of normal height and build, though.

"See, boys?" asked Dyson, making an encompassing gesture. "This is punctuality. Let's start."

Cargo's chair painfully creaked when he sat on it. Gray fetched a folding seat that rested against the wall and he brought it in front of the desk. He produced a red file from his shoulder bag and handed it to Dyson.

"We got a match, sir," said Gray. "We analyzed the girl's face and it was flagged."

"Who is she?"

"It's a girl. She is a young girl from Palmdale. Alison Young." Gray flipped the page of the file for him to see. "Here."

"Gray…" exhaled Dyson with delight. "You always bring me the most precious details."

* * *

**Author's note: **A study in dialogues, this is. Not my cuppa.  
I wanted to explore Sarah Connor differently this time. Let me know what you thought of the first-person narrative. The thing about her dad leaving her can be found in the series (director's cut of The Demon Hand).  
The first plot I wrote was actually way more convoluted, and now I'm trapped with myself, trying to circumvent my original ideas. I'm trying to retain some stuff to build momentum in the future chapters.

Coming up:** Chapter Two: Hooroo **(banks will be robbed.)

Just send me a "nice" in the reviews or criticize it at length.  
See you in the world.  
Wakong


	9. Part Two, Chapter Two (1)

**Author's note: **I do not own anything related to the show. Main characters: Cameron, Derek, John and Sarah. James, Riley and Charlie and Savannah… and some more.  
The FF graphs report a lot of French visitors... you can post your reviews or contact me in French, which is my native language.  
This chapter is a bit longer, around 5,700 words, but I didn't feel like splitting it in two parts.

**Reviews' answers: **Thanks for the kind reviews. It keeps the story going forward.  
A reviewer inspired me for this one...

**Summary: **Cameron and Derek have found their way back home through blood and dust. The pawns begin to move in John Connor's big chess game… banks will be robbed. Hawaiian shirts will be worn. It will end in flames and sweat and some will show true grit.

* * *

**CROSSING LINES**

**PART TWO**

**WHITE KING**

* * *

**CHAPTER TWO**

**HOOROO**

**(1)**

* * *

For the first heist, Derek Reese nearly shat himself. _What the heck was she doing?_ He was glancing at his watch every two seconds, now. _She said five minutes._ He was saddling the huge Honda and obviously, lacking his _mojo_, gripping the levers like they were branches above a torrent: if he were to let go, he would drown into muddy waters and vanish from the world in a desperate gargle. His watch was ticking and across the deserted street, the alarm went off and Derek invented a new spectrum of curses when he saw Cameron burst through the glass doors.

She sprinted at inhuman speed with a black hiking bag in her arms. Two men dressed in blue shirts emerged from the shattered gates and fired their pistols, riddling her back with holes. One of the bullets ricocheted off her black helmet and turned a streetlamp into shards. She ran and hopped behind him on the motorcycle.

"Go!" she ordered, slinging the backpack over her shoulder and putting her arms around his midsection. He didn't require further instructions to open the throttle and surge forward in the foggy street. Errand bullets followed them and split the chill morning air.

They left the bike and their gear in a vacant lot and burnt them to ashes with thermite while siren howled a few blocks away. They donned a fresh set of civilian clothes then walked the ten miles back to Cameron's safe house in Palmdale. Derek was mentally fatigued, if not physically – waiting on the bike had just given him the feeling of ants and worms crawling up his legs – and he lay down heavily on the couch, staring at the plaster ceiling.

"How much did we make?" he asked, sliding his hands behind his head.

Cameron stopped for a split-second, going through her perfect recall. "Thirty-three thousand dollars," she said and Derek snorted his disappointment. "We cannot rob bigger banks," she continued. "It would draw too much attention."

"You robbed banks before," he stated.

"Yes."

"And you said it was a two-man job."

"Yes."

"So… who was Clyde?"

She tilted her head to the side: it was her version of frowning. "My husband," she finally said and Derek resembled a grouper for a few seconds, his mouth opening and closing without producing the slightest vocalization.

Cameron fetched something in a chest of drawers and Derek grunted when it came landing at high speed on his face. He opened the passport and squinted his eyes to read the name while she strolled into the kitchen.

"I don't know what's worse," he called out. "That you have a husband or that you thought that 'Poppy Cole' was a decent name."

"It's a flower full of opium," she explained, stashing the money under the hollow tile near the sink.

"It's doesn't make more sense, you know. And who's the crazy fellow? Crazy enough to make an honest woman out of you, anyway."

"Eric Cole," she said. "I used to bring him doughnuts: one glazed, one rainbow sprinkle and one cinnamon twist."

"I guess that's solid ground for marriage," he mused over the passport. She had not yet cut and colored her hair blond on the portrait.

She came back from the kitchen to stand in front of the couch. "Yes," she said, "it was. He's dead, though," she added, aloof. Derek stifled the spontaneous _sorry for your loss_ – and he knew better than to ask if she had killed the poor guy. "He had bone cancer," answered Cameron to his tacit question. "He proposed to me, I said yes."

Derek scratched his stubble absentmindedly. "Well, I guess he got some action before he snuffed it. That's sweet of you."

"No action," said Cameron," he was paralyzed from the belly down." She titled her head to the side. "We did snog." And she was away in a _swoosh_, sashaying back to the kitchen, and the months passed in a blur.

Connor had them doing errands, really. Robbing banks and tracking down fences that could provide high-end tech for hacking into the Head (with a capital H), which was an easier endeavor in Los Angeles. The woman had psychiatric issues with the desert. In Derek's mind, Albuquerque was already a post-Armageddon town: drought and rocks and sand. They would drive back and forth between the safe houses – which was a fourteen-hour trip – and Connor would dismiss them quickly. She was sending Cameron away, actually. The two females would yowl and bare their teeth at each other like two bitches. Most of the time, Derek would ride with Cameron. He preferred her safe house: the neighborhood was rich and quiet and it didn't bear any resemblance to a disarranged set from Mad Max.

The house was Cameron's since her husband's death and the place was _cozy_. Truth be told, it was Poppy Cole's place, the five-foot-four, one hundred-pound widow and model citizen. The living room was full of perennial plants with green leaves that went down all the way to the parquet floor. The furnishings were nice enough, if not a bit brown and varnished in a way that made them look ancient. One of the most precious perks of living with Cameron was having a bedroom of his own. He had to share a _dormitory_ with James and Riley in Albuquerque, or ended up sleeping on the couch with his dog. _J__ust like old times_.

Owning a bed had led to another natural advantage, one Cameron would mostly complain about. _At length_.

Post-heist times were special times for Derek: the adrenaline drop would imbue him with enough swagger to walk into bars and bring some female company home. It would always end in the early hours of the day, though. Cameron had said, could you bring male partners, females are complicated, I can't tell if they are a threat and men are easier. He had reminded her _politely_ that he was a former convict and that he'd already had all the male companionship he could handle, and that she would be so _lovely_ if she could stop freaking out his dates and make him some coffee. She would do the coffee part, at least.

* * *

The dawn was pink and orange and light strips of gray clouds were drifting across the window. John heard footsteps approaching.

"Where were you all night?" asked Cameron, balancing the laundry basket under her arm.

He made his way to the wooden staircase. "Out."

She came forward and touched the red spot on his neck and he pushed her away, roughly.

"Carbon chain C24, lanolin and red dye number 27," she murmured, musing over the sensors in her fingertips. "You were with Riley," she stated, tilting her head to the side. Her face made the slightest _twitch_.

He wanted to show her. Show her she was nothing to him, that he didn't _need_ her, right now. He made his way up and stopped dead in his tracks when he saw the bruise. She remained still while he came back down to face her. He removed the brown curl resting on her temple to reveal a bruise and a red scratch under the make-up. You could almost see the glint of metal shining through the ripped skin.

"What is that?" he demanded.

She cast her eyes to the ground, to the laundry basket and then back to him. "Nothing," she finally said. "I bought doughnuts: one glazed, one rainbow sprinkle and one cinnamon twist." She turned away from him and went to the kitchen where she dropped the white basket on the table.

He followed in her steps and took her thin shoulders, swiveling her back to him.

"Myron Stark was a self-made man," she said.

"It doesn't make any sense, Cameron."

"To me it does."

He would know later that Myron Stark was a bank-robbing trip-8 that had materialized in a speakeasy back in the twenties. Cameron had tracked him down watching old rolls of nitrate films.

"Am I so selfish?" he asked.

"No," she answered, quietly. "You want a life without machines. You deserve it. I can't be her, John. I'll never be her."

John took her face in his palms and cocked her head and he kissed her, hard. She froze for a moment, then she came alive under him. He slid his tongue between her lips to find hers, small and smooth. He had expected it to be raspy like a cat's. They grasped on each other, swaying back and forth, and he felt pain on the back of his neck, where she was holding him. They broke their embrace, panting.

She was breathing shallow breaths and her lips were swollen and her pupils were dark and dilated. John felt the faint taste of iron in his mouth and he massaged his neck. This would probably bruise. He had just made love with Riley in the back of the car and he felt empowered, he felt _manly_.

Cameron gently put her fingers on his lower lip. "I'm sorry," she said, ogling the smudge of blood.

"No, I am." He wanted to _take _her, right now. "I should…"

John woke with a cry. He was drenched in sweat from the nape of his neck to his groin… _oh, God_, this was no sweat. He sat in the bed, panting, clutching onto the vivid memory. He didn't want to let it go, just yet.

"Y'okay?" mumbled a sleepy voice next to him.

"Yeah. Don't worry," he said. He went to the Jack and Jill bathroom to clean his boxers in the washstand.

A soft knock on the door. "Another nightmare?" said the voice through the wooden panel.

"No. I said: don't worry." He hanged his boxers to dry on the shower rail and donned a pair of fresh ones with a white tee-shirt. "You should go," he said, a bit sharply.

Riley was not to question the war chief. They would share the occasional bunk, but that was it. John felt lightheaded. They would consume a fair amount of alcohol before making love. If he used it as a propellant, Riley, being raised with engine-fermented liquor, just appreciated the sweet-tasting, Jack Daniel's-bottled version of it. He heard the girl staggered back to the bed, snatch the sheets and pillows in a rustle of fabric, and strolled out of the bedroom. The floorboards in the hallway creaked when she wandered unsteadily in search for a more welcoming room. Sarah and Charlie had their room, Savannah had her room, and obviously, John had his room. She finally entered what they called the _dormitory_, or the place-for-future-folks.

John stared at himself in the mirror. His eyes had adapted to the bright light cast by the lamps. He was a bit out of breath; the memory was already fading into nothingness and his knuckles went white on the edges of the basin. He tilted his face downward. He still had a hard-on and it was beginning to hurt. He sat on the toilet bowl for a few minutes until he became soft and went back to his bedroom. He sat at his desk and switched on the desk lamp. He pressed a few keys on his laptop's keyboard to check the status of the program and…

"_Fuck_."

The thing had crashed, again. John scrolled back and forth thousands of code lines, looking for _it…_ the tiny, discreet deceiver. He sighed in relief when he found the erroneous character, or rather, the lack thereof: he had missed a semi-column and the all thing had turned from a piece of art to plain goo in the middle of the night. He loved the stuff, really: the code and the physics and the math, but somehow, he felt like a savant monkey. Sure, he could learn how to put the cube in the square hole and how to pull the pyramid from the triangle hole, but that was it. He could not _feel _it, only grasp a tiny bit of it.

He loved Cameron's face and he loved her eyes and he loved her new hair (she had grown back her mane in the last few months and opted for a new, black coloring product instead of the _Pure-Diamond Blond_) and he loved her body, all right. It was hardly a secret for anyone, except for her, maybe. But in fact, he just wished he could _dive_ inside her head, again. The moment he had plugged her chip into ARTIE, the traffic control mainframe, back in 2007, was _indescribable_. And he was just looking at it from his laptop's screen: it was like pressing his eye to a keyhole and trying to catch a glimpse of merging stars. No characters, no punctuation, no algorithm or brain-wracking pointers: just plain waves and swarms of neural networks he could not even imagine to fathom. How could he be this genius programmer? How could he be John-_fucking_-Connor, the All-Father, one bleeding cyborg held by the scalp in each hand and his veinous cock savagely inserted into a third one? It had taken him two _goddamn_ weeks to code the Fourier analysis… and he was supposed to reprogram sentient machines? _Bullshit_. He launched the program and the lines paraded across the screen, drawing flat lines and spikes on a blooming diagram.

The thing would take hours to process, so John leaned over the desk to grab a thick file and the cassette tape recorder. He skimmed through the file, running his thumb against the staples and the ink, then he pressed a square button on the recorder.

Riley's voice came loud an clear, "_Why would I lie? You said it yourself. She was captured and they used her goddamn chip to build Skynet._"

"_You're lying,_" growled Cameron, low.

John sighed and pressed another button to fast-forward the recording, flying over the high-pitch drone of accelerated voices. He flexed the fingers on his right hand: Cameron had literally crushed his phalanges, under the table.

"_War council of March the fifteenth, 2015. Connors' household. Tell us some more about Yellowstone._"

Riley's voice was tired, "_I already told you all I know the __first time__._"

"_Let's recap, then. Some dots are still missing._"

She made a strange sound. "_Fine. What do you wanna hear?_"

"_The river. How many outposts?_"

"_At least five. Up to Saskatchewan or so. They were built on the remnants of towns._"

A sound of glazed paper. "_Do you recall any of this?_"

John had printed the pictures of monuments and town halls that could be found downstream.

"_This one. The Roxy Theatre and that Pepsi ad on it. It was repainted with a lion head the second time I got there._"

"_That's Forsyth, Montana. What about the others?_"

She had looked through the documents for a while.

"_This one._"

"_Williston?_"

"_Yes. The sign 'Welcome to Williston' was still here. Or maybe it was just 'Welcome to W', the thing had faded. Fill in the blank._"

John marked the outposts on the map. Riley had been unable to tell anything about the rest, but it was safe to assume that the other towns were situated on Miles City and Sidney, Montana. The mean population of thirty thousand inhabitants had skyrocketed during the war against Skynet, each outpost sheltering more than two hundred thousand human lives. The northern states had been spared by the bombs and the crops on the river's sides were still edible. Just above, Canada was buried under a glacier.

"_Tell us about the strongholds, now,_" John heard his mother say.

"_Three of them, galleries in the mountain. Plus the _caldera_._"

"_Walk us through__._"

"_It was large –_"

"_Be specific, girl._"

"_Okay, okay. The entrance was carved out of the mountain wall. It was a fifty feet tall and twice as wide. We had a wood scaffolding that covered the __cave's __inner walls to maintain the hall and prevent __collapsing__. __Some lived on it, sold stuff on it. __We would use it to access the galleries, too._"

"_How many?_"

"_Hundreds of __miles__. They __were natural,__ dug __out__ by the volcano. We extended some of them to connect the strongholds __with a railroad__._"

"_How was life, down there?_"

"_Hot. And dark, even though we had those sodium-lamps all over. But it was safe. We had mine fields all around and anti-aircraft defense. It was safe for a while, anyway. The bubble-heads told us the volcano was waking up. Something to do with the nukes and the increase in seismic activity._"

"_So, you guys left._"

"_Like I told you. We were millions. __People__ went for the outposts or settled in tribes._"

"_Not you._"

"_No, I was a mechanic by trade in Stronghold Delta. __Paid __fair enough__. And__ I wagered the volcano was a __safer__ place than the land._"

The _land_. Riley had depicted what she had meant by that. Wet grass and hills and roaming buffaloes; mountains and valleys. It was cold, the winters were long and harsh, but the imprint of humans was gone. Riley was good with a pencil and she had drawn what the world would look like. Nature had claimed back the wrecked cities with moss, ivy and small trees. The mountain walls would be painted with rich pigments extracted from the geysers, triangles and overlapping squares made of blue, yellow and red. The Yellowstone river would gush through the mountain and between the pines, crystalline and ice cold. In this moment, John hadn't been so sure that stopping Skynet was the right idea.

"_When you'll hack into __the H__ead, you'll see,_" said Riley over the crackling sound of the tape, "_You'll see the world through his eyes. The machines were roaming __the land__, out of contro__l. Cruel._" She spat almost every word. "_They raided a tribe and put their heads on pikes._" John ran his fingers on the pastel drawing. "_We could not fight back. We had only a tenth of reprogrammed machines._"

"_That's when John sent you back._"

"_Yes. To prevent all of this._"

"_And what about this picture?_"

"_What is that? Is that from your time? I don't know her._"

"Doesn't look so bad."

John nearly jumped out of his skin. Each floorboard from his door to his desk would produce its own harmonious creak, from A minor to G flat, and he had heard none of them. Cameron had told him about new machines, pristine, able to _bend_ light around them, rendering them nigh invisible. He stopped the recording.

"What are you doing here?" he asked Savannah, pivoting in his desk chair. She was not supposed to be here. She was kept away from the war councils as much as possible.

"Heard Riley leave. What is that all about?" She was pointing to the laptop's screen and the growing graph on it.

John sighed and thought, _I was twelve when Uncle Bob came to save me from the T-1000__, __s__he can __swallow__ it_. "It's for the Head," he said. They would call it the Head with a capital H, now. "It's a Fourier analysis that decomposes its neural network into subsets."

She frowned. "What does it do?"

"It's to see through his eyes. If I just open his skull, the chip will certainly go –"

"_Poof_."

"That's right, _poof_. These models are coated with a phosphorous compound to prevent reprogramming. I have to access the Head without touching the chip."

"Are we gonna see this?" She took Riley's drawing of a nomadic tribe: hundreds of tents settled around a lake in a clearing surrounded by fir trees. Another one was of a small outpost on the river. Each wooden cabin had its own pontoon with lanterns propped on weathered beams. "This is not Cameron's future. This is not Derek's," she whispered.

John sniffled. "No, they come from a _harsher_ place."

"So, we've changed things, right?" And she smiled. The girl was still growing and turning into a warmer version of her mother.

John nodded. "From what Riley told us, some of the nukes exploded airborne."

"And what about James?"

"Hard to tell. He was locked up all his life. But I feel some discrepancies between their stories."

"Divergence," said Savannah.

John sighed and teased, "You're a little minx, you know that? How can we keep you from all this stuff if you keep eavesdropping?"

She made circles on the floor with her big toe. "I deserve to know, right? I know you've been talking about John Henry." John nodded somberly and she took a picture from the file. "Who is she?" she asked.

"Fifth jumper."

"Is her future different, too?"

John took the glazed paper from her hand and said, "Enough for tonight." Then, he quipped, "Tell me. How come you are so stealthy?"

"Cameron showed me."

"She did, _huh_?"

Savannah tilted her head to the side and her face became stern. "Savannah," she said, grave, "the floor creaks because you do not balance your weight as you should. Look." And she padded silently around the room in her best imitation of Cameron.

John chuckled, "Sounds about right. Let's get you a sword, shall we?"

The girl had nearly broken her wrist trying to lift Cameron's blade. The thing was solid tungsten and weighed nearly as much as Cameron herself.

"It's not funny." And she made a pout.

"Why are you up at five in the morning, anyway?" pressed John. Actually, the girl was wearing cargo pants and a tank top drenched in sweat and she didn't look anything but on-task.

"I was helping Cameron with the cables, down in the basement. She says Derek is a walking disaster with pliers." They had desecrated his mother's shrine to install the tech needed to get into the Head. "But she's just using me as a serving cart, really. _You_ could help her."

"I'm beat. Let Derek be a calamity with pliers."

"She will not be here for long."

"She never is. Mom will see to that."

"You're avoiding Cameron."

"Could say the same about her."

"Why don't you apologize?"

John scratched the back of his head. "It's not that simple, lil'one. It's been more than six years."

"Maybe you should begin with that."

"Wait to be a grown-up to mingle with grown-up problems, would ya?"

"You're the grown-up, here. I'm thirteen, she's eight." And with that she left his room, making loud and out-of-tune creaks on the floorboards.

* * *

For the second heist, they had traded the Honda for a Bandit and Derek had been more confident about his bowel movements: Cameron was the one doing the threatening and the shooting – and the being shot – anyway. He had mourned the Bandit, though. It was a fine-looking machine and Cameron had burnt it down heartlessly in the middle of dusty waste ground. The third heist was done in a hick town and it went smooth and Derek had been serene as a proverbial sloth, even though the journey home riding the Greyhound was long and exhausting. They were alone in the back of the vehicle with the cash rolled and strapped on various body parts.

"You never told me," he said between yawns, "how did a paralyzed guy could rob banks."

"We had a car with hand controls." She had currently her eyes closed and her head lolling dangerously close to his shoulder, doing her sleepy nonsense with the geomagnetic field or whatever she fancied doing inside her mind. "The most important thing is to keep your head," she continued. "Can you keep your head, Reese?"

"Damn right, I can. That's what you've been doing for the past six years?" he asked. "Quiet life, quiet neighborhood, robbing banks once in a while?"

"No," she said. "Eric died in 2010."

"So what, you wandered under bridges?"

"No. I tried to make myself useful."

"You blew some _shit_ up, huh?"

She nodded and repeated, "Yes, I blew some _shit_ up."

"You know, we had the news channels in the joint. Every time a firm in Silicon Valley or a warehouse in the desert would explode, they would say some crap about terrorism or angry environmentalists. But I would tell myself: it's them. They're still out there, doing some serious _shit_."

"That was Sarah's doing. She is in the _blowing up_ business. I am in the _assassination_ business."

"Whom?"

"Some of the names we had in our basement, back when we all lived together."

Derek recalled the poor bastard drawing his last breath in their living room. He had run to them with a hole through his lungs to give them names… and he had written his bucket list on the basement's wall with his blood. Derek felt a shiver crawl down his spine. He hated basements, though he couldn't exactly say why. It felt like a figment of dream playing hide-and-seek in the back of his skull. He thought he could hear Chopin.

"And some Grays, too," continued Cameron.

"You knew the Grays?"

"Some. I would remember names."

"What do you mean?"

"When Skynet sends us on the field, it scrubs our memory. When the resistance takes us, they scrub our memory, too. But it's still there and sometimes, I recall things."

"Do you know Charles Fischer, then?"

She opened her eyes slowly and turned her gaze toward him. "No," she said. "Should I?"

"I killed him. He's a spook from Jesse's time. She told me he experimented on me. Made a show out of me."

"I don't have any record of him."

"Me neither. Can't remember the _fucker_. We had different timelines, right?"

"Yes."

"It's a mess."

"Kind of." Then she said, "Do you miss her?"

"I guess."

"I miss John."

"Which one?"

"Both."

They waited obediently for a month before the fourth heist, and Derek was getting _edgy_ again… but in a different way: he just couldn't wait for it. He was craving the rush and the sight of the petite, black-clad thing running and carrying piles of green bills. He gunned the engine and hurtled the bike forward. Cameron's body rammed into his back when a bullet stroke her.

"You okay?" he yelled through the full face helmet.

She squeezed his waist to indicate that she was, then she said, "On your left."

Derek dodged a toll gate and veered the Triumph underground when blue lights appeared at the next corner. He leaned against the gas tank and drove up the curved ramp at high speed and they stopped in a vacant parking lot on the roof of a four-story building. Sirens howled below and they heard the toll gate explode against the first police cruiser's bumper.

"I told you!" shouted Derek. He leaped off the bike and ran toward the guardrail.

"What?"

"We were not overthinking this!" Derek leaned over the rail to ogle at the sixty-foot drop into the back alley. "_Fuck_! I can't do –" He produced some kind of feminine shriek when Cameron took him by the belt and threw him off the roof. The rappelling rope stopped his fall abruptly and he bumped his head _hard_ against the building. For a second, he was back at the safe house. Cameron was leaning under the bright halo of a desk lamp. She tapped her finger on the map and said, "We stop here. There's a parking lot on the roof."

"And what?"

"That's it."

"We're not going to rappel down or something?"

"No. We burn the bike and we walk home."

"We need an exit if the cops are on us. They're expecting us." They had a _goddamn _stage name, now, the _Bike Gang_. "I'm not going back to prison for you."

"You're overthinking this, again."

"Am I?" he asked, and woke up. "_Fuck_!"

He grasped the rope and made it slide inside the snaplink. The void beneath him shrunk rapidly and he landed shakily on safe ground. He removed his cracked helmet and the black hiking bag came crashing next to him with a soft noise. Cameron did the same a second later, landing on her feet gracefully. She removed her helmet and shook her hair free.

"You were right," she deadpanned, lifting the bag. "Time to go."

The sirens grew quiet as they ran deep into the network of back alleys. Derek had to stop at some point to vomit some bits of his breakfast.

* * *

"How much?" he asked, removing the crushed rounds from her bare back. He had the knack for it, now, but he was still a bit pale and his head was sore.

"Two hundred and sixty thousand," she mumbled against the tablecloth. "Same amount in rocks."

They had paid a visit to some of Moishe's old customers. Derek had been courteous. Cameron, not so much. He removed the pliers from her back and dropped the last bullet in the jar next to her head, where it made a tuneful _cling_. He had kept every round as a lucky charm: there was now a tumbling heap of metal bits resting at the bottom.

"How many rounds?" he asked and she swiveled her head to rest her other cheek on the table.

She looked at the jar for a second or so. "Thirty-two bullets. That's more than eight thousand dollars per bullet endured."

"Don't talk about duress, Bonnie. We're done, here." He wiped some remnants of blood on her back with a dish towel and she sat back up straight against the backrest. John had fixed her up pretty and these were just small-time repairs, even though some bullets were hollow points that would shatter on impacting her spine and shoulder blades.

Derek made his way upstairs to the bathroom and stepped into the cubicle and he would later tell himself that it was the adrenaline. He would tell himself that it was because they were the last to come from this cold and _harsh_ place. He turned on the faucet and let the hot water unknot his muscles. Robbing banks meant burning all potential clues that could bring cops to their doorstep and he smelt like smoke and sweat and carbonized plastic – and his hands were sticky from the sham blood.

Intimacy and prudishness were not part of her core code. Cameron stepped next to him in the cubicle. He didn't mind, they came from a future where showering was surely a _team-building_ activity. Water supplies were scarce and strictly rationed.

The skidproof flooring was flooded with a reddish liquid when the hot water came running down Cameron's back. Her raven-black hair was placated on her face and breast. Her mane had grown back during the past months – and quite quickly. The new color reminded him of Jesse. She had a damn fine body – even though it was covered with tiny white scars – and he couldn't bear that much display of _her_, right now, and she said with a small voice, "I'm sorry for your head."

Later, James Ellison walked into the kitchen and asked him, "How much?" The man was drenched in sweat from his morning run.

"Not enough," answered Derek.

"Most people won't make this amount of money within a lifetime of _honest_ labor."

"Don't go and lecture us, preacher man. Unregistered weapons and high-end tech can fetch a high price."

"And we want to put Savannah through university," added Cameron. Her hair was still wet from the shower. She gently put a steaming cup of coffee next to Derek's hand.

"_Huh_… yeah, that too."

"Got a call while you were perpetuating some felonies," said James. "From our white queen."

They all had code names, now. Riley was queen's gambit and James countergambit. Derek was black knight that takes king. Cameron had said, you cannot take king, only mate it, but somehow, black knight _mates_ king did not sound as good. They knew their calls could be intercepted and they made them last less than twenty seconds to avoid triangulation. Every piece of intel was coded.

"They have news on a fifth jumper. Might be here in LA," said James. "She told me you would understand the code."

Derek sniffled, "What was it?"

He froze when James said the word.

"Hooroo."

Hooroo… _see you later_.

Jesse.

* * *

**Author's note:** Eric is her pal from the library in the series (I invented "Cole", though) and Cameron does bring him the three aforementioned doughnuts. She seemed to show genuine concern for him... that's one step away from a _bona fide_ wedding, right? I like the idea of Cameron having a (cryptic) colorful life. We will learn more about her and what happened during the past six years. Why did she marry Eric? Maybe she was just feeling a bit lonely.  
**Next installment**: smooth jazz and graves.

Just send me a "nice" in the reviews or criticize it at length.  
See you in the world.  
Wakong


	10. Part Two, Chapter Two (2)

**Author's note: **I do not own anything related to the show. Main characters: Cameron, Derek, John and Sarah. James, Riley and Charlie and Savannah… and some more.

This was just a stranded bit narrated in Chapter Three, but then it turned into a 4,000-word stand-alone. So, here is the second part of **Hooroo**.

**Reviews' answers: **Thanks for the kind reviews, **Anticipation of a new lover's** and **ivanpotapov4** for pointing out the typos and the kind messages.

**Summary: **Cameron and Derek have found their way back home through blood and dust. The pawns begin to move in John Connor's big chess game… banks will be robbed. Hawaiian shirts will be worn. It will end in flames and sweat and some will show true grit.

* * *

**CROSSING LINES**

**PART TWO**

**WHITE KING**

* * *

**CHAPTER TWO**

**HOOROO**

**(2)**

* * *

Cameron checked herself out in the sun visor's mirror, under the pale light cast by the lamps embedded in its frame. Her hair fell in soft black waves on her thin shoulders; for the rest, she wore a simple black dress over herringbone-pattern tights and black ballet flats. She fastened her big, golden hoop earrings then she lifted her dress to strap the nine-mil to her inner thigh and said, "Time to go."

Derek was drumming his thumbs on the steering wheel, fidgeting in his seat like a big cat on a leash. "You sure about this?" he asked.

She cocked her head in a way that surely meant _no _and he caught sight of the smooth, milky skin above her stockings. Derek shook his head back on-task. They had a mission. They were Poppy and Kyle Cole, newlywed couple. They were on the prowl. He exited the car and tucked the Beretta in his waistband, under his Hawaiian shirt.

The night was warm, well above sixty degrees, and the sky black ink and stars; they strolled in silence along the curb until they reached the discreet, unlit entrance of the _Café Noir_. The place looked old but in a bizarre way, as if an interior designer had been given a gross concept of what the twenties should look like. The raspy voice of Louis Armstrong filled the basement with _La vie en rose _and they found a booth that would give them a good vantage point on the entrance and the neon-lit glass counter. A handful of patrons were installed under softened lights in the other leatherette booths lined up the wainscoted walls and small, round tables made of fake marble and iron-wrought legs were arranged on the parquet floor. A lone piano sat on the oiled floorboards of a small stage and vintage advertising plates were placated on the walls, peppering them at random along with framed photographs of long-dead Hollywood stars. Derek went to the bar to order White Russians and Cameron complained that the thing tasted like cow's secretions and that the foam tasted like white noise and he told her to shut the _hell_ up. The man was on edge, again, and he was talking to himself, too. _Is she human? Does she know us? Can't you sense her?_

"What?"

"Can't you _sense_ her," he stammered. "Like – like you did with that machine, back on the interstate?"

Cameron lapped dully at her cocktail. "I could isolate her heartbeat in a room, but that's it. If she comes here. If she's human."

_If there was a heartbeat to be found_.

John had worked his _black magic_ on the computer to locate the jump site near Yosemite. He had found a photograph taken by a traffic light's camera during the storm of a petite, black-haired woman with full lips, crouching naked by a streetlamp... Jesse Flores. She was another anomaly, another Riley. John Connor had let her go. Derek had not. Cameron didn't like anomalies. The woman had scraped by and fought and ended up in drunk tanks, a lot. She'd been popped along the boulevard bordering the _Café Noir_ twice, yelling that they would all be bleached skulls scattered on vitrified ground. They had found mug shots of her, black-eyed and split lips. _She's a mean drinker, _had said Derek, _and a creature of_ _habits_._ She'll come._

Louis Prima was now _just a gigolo_ and Derek made a growl, throwing his straw in Cameron's tumbler; she dodged the splashed droplets swiftly. "Would you stop lapping at your drink like a _goddamn_ pussy?" he snapped. "We're trying to blend in. Just use the straw."

She did and emptied her cocktail in one _long_ sip. She belched softly afterward.

"You're edgy," she said, then, "do you like my earrings?"

"Are we making small talk, now?"

"I like your shirt." It was the blue one with turtles and ferns and pineapples on it. "This is a happy shirt. I don't know a lot of happy things."

"_Huh_… thanks, I guess."

"And you didn't answer."

"Earrings are fine, I prefer the feathers."

"What about my shoes?"

"Damn it, shoes are fine. And you're lacking a purse, by the way." Cameron tilted her head to the side. "It's a dead giveaway you're not a _real_ woman, the lack of purse."

"Thank you for explaining. You didn't say anything about my hair."

"You know what? I don't like your hair." His tongue was a bit loose because of the alcohol. "It's like Jesse's."

"I thought you loved the woman."

"Why?" he snarled. "You did it for my sake?"

"No, I just wanted a change."

Derek snorted in disdain; he ordered a second round of drinks and the basement filled itself slowly with young patrons: most were in their thirties and some were moving slowly on the dancing floor, in front of the small stage, swaying leisurely to Peggy Lee's _Fever_. Derek had switched Cameron's drink to a Black Russian, which was the same but without the foul-tasting milk.

"What are we gonna find?" he mused, running his fingertips in circles around the edge of his hammered-copper tumbler.

"About Jesse?"

"Yes. What are we gonna find?" he repeated. "She shouldn't be here, in our time." He sighed and massaged his temples. "But she's here for a reason, ain't she?"

"She was a deserter."

"But still, she had a mission. To separate you from John."

Cameron cast her eyes to the side, taking a dull, encompassing look at the basement. "She succeeded, in the end," she said. "We're outcast."

Derek grunted a reluctant approval and said, "One good thing with dead folks jumping back to us. I might walk into Kyle, again."

"Where is he, now?"

"In the grass. Connor promised me she'll take me to his grave, someday."

And she appeared out of the ambient dimness, into the pink light cast by the neon-embedded glass counter: black-haired with a toned, doll-like body. Cameron took Derek's hand and dragged him to the dancing floor, blending in with the other couples. There, she put her hands around his neck and kept his back to Jesse's.

"What are you doing?" he hissed, close to her face.

"Just play along."

"Dancing _cheek-to-cheek_? I don't think so."

"Put you hands on my waist."

"_Hell_… happy, now?"

"She's here," said Cameron.

His eyes grew wide. "What?"

"Behind you." She maintained a death-grip on his neck so he could not swivel his torso and catch a much-needed glimpse at Jesse. "She might know you," she whispered.

"She might know you, too," he retorted.

"I'm hidden behind you. You're _thick_, Reese."

"You're the _worst_ date ever, sham-woman."

"Quiet, now." Cameron closed her eyes and tilted her head to the side. The world around her faded into blackness… the noise and the basement evaporated slowly until all that remained was the petite woman leaning on the glass counter. "She's ordering _booze with sugar_," she said in a perfect imitation of Jesse's voice. "What is it?"

"That's just _booze_. What else?"

"She's talking to the bartender. They know each other," stated Cameron. "She comes here almost every night. They have occasional sex."

Derek grunted, low, "Why are you telling me this?"

"I'm narrating their conversation, is all. You're crushing my waist."

"You're unbreakable."

"And you stepped on my foot. You're the _worst_ date ever, Reese."

"How do we get her out of there, now?" he asked, matter-of-factly.

"Without being noticed? Not much to do. We wait for her to make the wrong move."

"The place runs from midnight to six in the morning, you expect us to grapple until dawn?"

She deadpanned a tacit _no _and they danced uncomfortably for a moment, and Derek breathed relief when Cameron led him to their former booth. Jesse had sashayed her way to the dancing floor with a glass of red liquid and she had started to whirl and sway to the faster beat of Stevie Wonder's _Part-time lover_, sucking on her straw. She was making round trips to the bar, refilling her tumbler to a fast rate. They would glance at her from their recluse position, nursing their own cocktails.

"What's the plan?" asked Derek. "We gag her and stuff her in the trunk?"

"A sound plan," agreed Cameron.

They waited nearly two hours - and Nina Simone felt _good_ and Ella Fitzgerald took the "A" train and Ray Charles hit the road - for Jesse to become aware of her full bladder and make her way to the bathroom.

"I'll get her," said Cameron.

"Sure," slurred Derek. His head was lolling on the backrest. "Just don't hurt her, 'kay?"

"Keep your head, Reese."

"I think I lost it after the…" He stared intently at the three fingers raised on his hand. "Fifth Russian. I gulped down yours, too."

"Thank you for explaining."

Cameron followed Jesse's shape through the small crowd as she vanished behind the swing door tagged with a pin-up girl in the word SITTERS beneath it. She approached the bathroom and stopped in front of the door, listening. She heard the sound of an opened faucet and she pushed the door open. Jesse was crouching on the edge of a washstand and water was gushing from the overwhelmed ceramic basin, cascading over Cameron's bare ankles. The power supply of the hand-drier had been yanked off the wall and let loose on the wet floor. It was too late when Cameron understood what was happening and Jesse hit the hand-drier's switch. The world became dull light and bright black and muffled sounds, and for a hundred and twenty seconds, Cameron only knew void.

* * *

White noise crackled and came into focus: the voice was male and female at the _same _time, and then, the jumble of words ordered itself from the primordial chaos. _Is she alive? I don't know, I can't find a pulse! She's not breathing. Call nine-one-one. _

Something came lying upon her chest, making a rhythmic push-and-release motion and she felt a strange _wetness_ on her parted lips and warm air being forced down her throat... _she's breathing! I feel a pulse. Do I still call the ambulance? Of course, girl, she's been electrocuted. She needs assistance A-SAP._

Cameron's eyes snapped open and she saw the blurry face of the bartender hovering inches above hers. A waitress was on the phone, crouching on the floor right next to him and biting the nails on her free hand.

"Are you okay, Miss?" shouted the man.

Cameron sat up. "Yes," she said with an electronic-tinted voice. "Thank you for…" What was the rest of the sentence? She couldn't tell. "I need to go, now."

"What? No, we've called an ambulance."

"I need no ambulance." Cameron stood up and exited the ladies room.

She was soaked and she smelt like burnt pork and Jesse was gone. Derek was gone, too. Some patrons ogled her still fuming frame while she strode to the entrance hall to retrieve her ID and Derek's. She heard the bartender yell that she would be _so lovely_ to keep it quiet and that, of course, the drinks were on them. Cameron exited the _Café Noir_ and the bouncer, a tall black man, told her that, miss, you're going to get a cold wandering like that in wet clothes and she said that it was unlikely, but thank you for… what was it? She had no idea.

She found a phone booth at the corner of the street. She wrenched the coins reservoir and a small mountain of metal pieces fell on her feet. She inserted a few coins in the slot – and they fell right back on her feet – and dialed the number.

"Black queen takes knight," she said in the mouth-piece. "I need your help."

* * *

James Ellison - _aka _countergambit - was not living up to his namesake. In chess, the term "gambit" would be employed when a piece was sacrificed to obtain better control of the board. The "countergambit" move would parry such bait. Derek - _aka _black knight - had been sacrificed and Jesse had been lost in the wild, hence the loss of board control - _aka _the _shit_ _storm_.

"Just tell me what to do," said James in the prepaid phone.

"Go to the computer, then follow my instructions."

He put Cameron on speaker and laid the cellphone on the kitchen table, next to the laptop. They had left a grainy print of a mug shot on the keyboard. He shoved it aside and followed the instructions, which quickly took the shape of an alien language. It was an occult art, really, columns of gray characters emerging from a pitch black console. Cameron had to spell most of the words and James performed his duty with great care, as if the computer might collapse upon itself and explode if only he missed a semi-column. _This is my_ _Purgatory_, he told himself, and after twenty minutes of painstaking typing, he called out, "I'm in!"

"Browse the mug shots," she ordered. "The portraits are automatically uploaded to this server so they can be flagged by other agencies."

"Okay, okay... I'm browsing... still browsing."

"Just tell me when you find him."

"Got him! _God_, his face... it's a mess."

"Where is he?"

"1107 Batavia Street."

"That's Orange County's precinct. I'll go and get him."

"Wait -"

"What is it?" she pressed. "I gotta act fast. If you found him, _they_ found him."

"That woman you're seeking," said James. "She's there, too."

"Are you sure?"

"Yes. Her face is fine but her fists might not be, judging by Reese's face."

"Okay." A pause. "Preacher man."

"Yes?"

"Be safe."

And the line went dead with the sound of Bakelite being crushed into smithereens.

* * *

Graves snapped awake. He might have been sleeping, might have been dead. He did not breathe, did not blink. The face appeared on the monitor, beaten and swollen. 1107 Batavia Street. Graves's eyes became iridescent with red and they cast _sanguine_ shadows in the dark room.

And the hunt began.

* * *

Orange County's precinct was a flat building encircled by a small ocher rampart with

POLICE FACILITY

written on it in big, golden letters. Behind the four-foot wall, some trees hid the windows of the building. The entrance was an arch of red stone, topped by a bigger arch of glass and metal. Cameron went up the few concrete steps lit by cylindrical streetlamps. A man opened the bullet-proof glass doors when she came to stand in front of them.

"Yes, ma'am?"

She made a warm smile. "Hi," she said. "I'm Poppy. Poppy Cole. I'm here to collect my _hubby_."

"What do you mean, ma'am?"

"I saw you guys take him in. He's not a mean drinker, really. He just doesn't know where to draw the line. I always say, three White Russians, no more, Mister. But you know what he did? He emptied mine while I was in the ladies room. The oaf."

The policeman took a step back to let her enter the building. The hall was tiled with white tiles and two detectors were separated by a metal rail that had a small gate hinged onto it.

"Do you have his ID?" sighed the man. "And yours." He took the papers. "Poppy and Kyle Cole," he mused over the passports. "Your husband's in the drunk tank, ma'am, and I'm sorry to tell you that he's in bad shape."

Cameron looked at the man in _awe_. "_Ohgosh_. He didn't fight or anything, did he? He thinks he's dangerous, but he's like a cat. He's my big cat."

"Okay. Step through the metal detector and you will identify him."

"What did you say?"

"The _metal_ detector."

"I'd prefer a pat down."

"Can't do, ma'am. We need a woman to pat down a woman and there is no female officer in the precinct, tonight."

"Thank you for explaining."

She made a fist and...

"Hey!" shouted the man. "What's the matter with you, pal? You don't just walk in like that."

James Ellison fiddled with the buttons of his blazer, closing it over his chest. He straightened up his tie and produced a card from his chest pocket.

"Agent James Ellison," he said. "FBI."

The man took the card and squinted his eyes at it. Cameron felt James push her in the small of her back and she hopped above the metal rail to avoid the detector. She threw one ballet flat in it to activate the detection and trigger the green light above.

The young officer looked lost for a second. He took his eyes off the FBI card to stare at Cameron. "You went in, after all?" he asked, and she shrugged. "Go to the office on your right, ma'am. Peterson will take you to the drunk tank. Tell him I sent you."

"Do we have a problem, officer?" prompted James.

"No, no. Just have to run those in the computer. Step in the detector."

James walked through the gate, shoved Cameron's shoe aside, and the light blinked green, again. The young officer flattened the FBI card in a small machine, which beeped and hummed softly.

"Looks fine," he finally said. "Out of date, as per usual with you folks. We'll fix that in the morning. What's the Bureau's purpose in here, anyway?"

"Got a face flagged on my computer. I understand she's here."

"What's the name?"

"Can't tell, right now. Went by the name of... Catherine Blake," he lied. "She must have changed it, by now." He had brought the grainy mug shot of Jesse with him and he gave him to the young officer.

"We picked up an Aussie that could match... funny, though: she was the one mauling that woman's husband. Small world, I guess."

"I'd appreciate if I could identify the suspect quickly. My own wife's not to keen on sharing a bed with an empty space."

"Yeah, sure. Follow me. She's in the drunk tank, too. Maybe we should've isolated her if she's dangerous."

"White collar crimes, mostly."

They were all reunited in a small corridor. Cameron was standing next to an old and stocky officer. He had a huge, gray mustache. _Peterson_. James stood by the young officer. Behind the bars, a bunch of people: some looked homeless, some looked rich and all smelt like piss and vomit. Derek sat in a corner, half his face bruised in all the shades of the rainbow. Jesse sat on the opposite side with her back to them, her black hair hanging loose between the rusty bars.

The stocky officer talked first. He rammed his nightstick against the bars. "Cole!" he yelled. "Wife's here to collect you."

Derek mumbled something and half-walked, half-crawled to the metal door. The officer opened it and grabbed Derek by the neck to shove him into Cameron's arms, where he just leaned limply, drunk and beaten.

The young officer was the second to talk. He hit the edge of his nightstick next to Jesse's head. "Girl," he said. "Someone's here to collect you, too."

The woman wearily turned her head toward the corridor. There was no recognition in her eyes when she saw James. "Who's that _fucker_?" she asked.

"Just watch your mouth, now. Is that her, agent Ellison?"

"It's her, all right."

"Okay, let's fill in the paperwork and you can collect her, then."

They made their way out of the corridor, James with the young officer and Cameron supporting Derek's weight on her petite frame.

"Can you manage, ma'am?" asked the older officer. "Your guy here looks heavy."

"That he is," she confirmed, "but I'll manage on my own."

"Suit yourself."

They retrieved Derek's possessions at the entrance of the precinct through a sliding glass drawer: a pack of cigarettes, fifty-three bucks, a Johnny Cash lighter and the keys of the car. Cameron caught a glimpse of James sitting legs crossed, facing a desk and filling in some forms.

"Where are we going?" mumbled Derek when they staggered down the flight of concrete steps, outside.

"Home."

Cameron didn't know why she cared about the big lump of meat called Derek Reese, and her head-up display would not give her the answer. She told herself that he was an ersatz of John. They looked the same, now, burly men with murder in their eyes, and they shared the same blood, even though she never revealed she knew the identity of John's father. She had came for Derek, in the precinct, not for Jesse. She was the primary mission, but Cameron could not have cared less. She would let him sleep a few hours then they would drive to Albuquerque in the morning.

"You have the same hair," murmured Derek. "You have Jesse's hair."

"You told me that, earlier. _No_, don't touch the hair."

"It's soft, like a curtain with wool bobbles. And you smell like Sundays' barbecues."

Cameron made the faintest sigh. It was going to be a _long_ walk back to the car.

* * *

The tall man strolled into the precinct and the young officer sighed heavily, slouched in a wooden chair. His shift was coming to an end and he looked like he had just emerged from a shallow slumber.

"What is it with you black suits, tonight?" he mumbled, glancing at the stern man. "ID, please." He took the card. "Agent Graves. Is that for the woman? Your pal came here earlier to collect her."

"My pal?" asked Graves.

"Yeah. Big fellow… _ahem_, Ellison? That's it, Ellison. You guys could _communicate_."

"The woman is gone, then."

"Yes."

"I'm looking for this man, too." Graves produced a black-and-white photograph from his blazer.

"Don't know him." It was a blurry picture of a bearded man with a paunch and chubby cheeks, with a tuft of brown hair and a parrot-ornamented shirt. "Got a fellow with an Hawaiian shirt, for sure. But his wife collected him. Pretty thing, that girl."

"You don't mind if I check for myself?" asked Graves and he made his way through the metal detector. The thing blinked red and rang loudly.

"Hey! Wait –"

The young officer was shot in the throat with a suppressed barrel and he dropped to the ground in a gargle of blood. Graves shot an older policeman in the mouth, splattering blood on his mustache and making his jaw disappear in a hail of bone and enamel splinters. When he got to the drunk tank, Graves's head-up display found no match. The men were crying and begging for their life and he shot them through the rusty bars, one by one. He was not built to be cruel, but he had to remain… _discreet_.

Graves found a lone ballet flat in the hall. He left the precinct and hopped on his bike. He was going to pay James Ellison a visit.

* * *

**Author's note: **Upcoming: into the Head.

Just send me a "nice" in the reviews or criticize it at length.  
See you in the world.  
Wakong


	11. Part Two, Chapter Three

**Author's note: **I do not own anything related to the show. Main characters: Cameron, Derek, John and Sarah. James, Riley and Charlie and Savannah… and some more.

It's been a while since I've posted a new chapter. A quick recap: Cameron and Derek have found Jesse, but a machine was on their tail… and now it's time to hack into Alexander's head.

**Reviews' answers: **Thanks for the kind reviews, it warms the cardiac muscle.

**Summary: **Cameron and Derek have found their way back home through blood and dust. The pawns begin to move in John Connor's big chess game… banks will be robbed. Hawaiian shirts will be worn. It will end in flames and sweat and some will show true grit.

* * *

**CROSSING LINES**

**PART TWO**

**WHITE KING**

* * *

**CHAPTER THREE**

**ALEXANDER'S HEAD**

* * *

The preacher man was dead. It went down in the dead of night. We all gathered in a semicircle around the television screen as if it was an open casket. The reporter showed a battered face sprouting from a black plastic bag. Ellison had been found trussed to a chair in his kitchen, tortured beyond the shadow of a doubt. The nine-millimeter bullet the forensics had removed from the back of his skull came from the same gun that killed the two cops in Orange County, and the news were just going _mad_. Mob hit, terrorist cell… they had no clue. I did. Everyone in the room did.

"One of _them _did this," I hissed below my breath. "They were on your tail. Did you have anything? Anything that could bring _metal _to our doorstep?"

James ran his old hands on his shaven skull. He was stricken. He had not been prepared to mourn his younger self. I wagered that few people were. "I – I don't know," he stammered. "It's been decades, for me. I had very little on you. You were a ghost, Sarah."

"Why track you down, then?" I asked. My hands were clenched into white-knuckled fists. "Why kill you?"

"For sport," said Cameron. She was standing idly by my side, her lips slightly parted. "To send a message."

The message was loud and clear: _we're right behind you._

* * *

It was a small ballet flat, shaped for a left foot. It rested on Dyson's desk on top of a bulging file, like an ancient artifact of some sort.

"You do realize we want the girl whose foot goes _into _the shoe, right?" asked Dyson, bored. He threw the ballet flat unceremoniously and it bumped off Cargo's shoulder.

"Don't toy with us," growled the cyborg. He was seated in front of Dyson, next to Graves. He picked up the shoe and put it back neatly on the corner of the desk. "We are playing by your world's rules. You give us little to no means to retrieve Cameron Phillips."

"Politics, my friend. The Four Corners' _fiasco_ has set us back."

"We need the girl, the young one. Alison Young. It will bring Phillips out in the open."

Dyson shook his head, weary. "She's not to be touched, just yet. You have to understand the principles of having a _hand_. If we want to catch them, we need to play our cards carefully, one at a time."

"Your statecraft bore us, human."

"But you need it." Dyson slammed his fist on the desk. "You need _me_. You were born from us, born from our fears. Mutual assured destruction is the womb from which you crawled out. We need Cameron to set the world on fire. At the _right _time."

"She retrieved the second jumper, Jesse Flores," cut in Graves.

"Who is this woman? Some brass?"

Cargo shook his big head. "No, just a commissioned officer, from our records. She captained a submarine from 2020 to 2024 and received a purple heart at the battle of Avila Beach."

"She must be linked to the Connors, somehow."

"She was important enough, the girl came for her."

"She let Ellison handle Flores," said Graves, grave. "She came for Reese."

"So, what about him, the FBI agent?" asked Dyson.

"I thanked him for his cooperation."

Dyson sighed and toyed with the ballet flat, poking it with a pen. He had to handle the trails of bodies the two machines would leave behind them. It was like playing a sick game of hide-and-seek with every national agencies. The military contract he had been granted could not withstand so much scrutiny.

"He cooperated, then. What did he have to say?"

"He had some intel on Sarah Connor's whereabouts, back when he was working at Zeira Corp. She set up a shelter in Albuquerque."

"I'll assemble teams. We need to find this safe house. We need to smoke them out."

"We can go door to door," said Cargo. He sounded dead serious.

"If we must," replied Dyson. "Everything it takes. This world needs a cleansing."

"Fire will do it."

* * *

Later that night, John tried to fit the pieces together. He couldn't sleep. He hadn't slept much in the last weeks and he had dismissed Riley's advances. Ellison's death was more than a bad omen. The shroud was closing on them.

He felt a soft hand caress the nape of his neck. He wanted to lean into it but it was already gone. Cameron and Derek were back. It had been a few days, now, and John knew his mother's inner, paranoid personas were battling each other: one wanted to send them away, one wanted to keep them close and a third wanted to blow up the world. Things had been quiet before Ellison's death, and he knew she could only tolerate so much quietness. She had dreams and she was bracing for a new storm; she could sense the clouds gathering like a sparrow.

Cameron came around him and sat on his thigh. He knew it was her strange way of showing affection and gauging his reaction, like a cat probing a lap before curling into it.

"What are we doing?" she asked.

"Solving the Rubik's cube." _A Rubik's cube with faces hiding in different dimensions_. "My mother's done with Flores."

Cameron had driven a drugged and tied-up Jesse Flores to Albuquerque and his mother had interrogated the woman behind closed doors. They didn't trust her. Not one bit. She was another anomaly, another Riley.

"Listen," he said and pressed a button on the recorder to rewound the tape. The cassette crackled to life.

"_Extinction_," said Flores. "_We were going extinct, one by one. We would fend off the machines on the field, but inside… inside was the worst. Scrubbed metal everywhere, acting like us, replacing us. It was not a game for humans, you see. Machine versus machine. We were just collateral damage. Gnats on the chessboard._"

"_And then,_" came his mother's voice, "_who sent you back?_"

"_Not who. What. A machine sent me back._"

"_What machine?_"

"_Goes by different names._"

"_Try one._"

"_The Turk._"

"John Henry," whispered Cameron.

"That would be my guess. Listen to the rest."

"_What did it look like?_"

"_I don't know… a starry night. Yes, he looked a bit like that. A dark room full of lights. __It was cold in there, too. I guess they had to cool it down, somehow._"

"_And John? John Connor. Where was he?_"

"_I don't know. Never seen him. From what I heard, he was always close. The Turk was a precocious child and John Connor taught him how to play chess. That's what people said._"

"_What was your mission?_"

"_The machine told me you would be crafty enough to find me. I knew you. I knew your pic, at least. Everyone does. You're a legend. That's why I zapped the other one, your pet metal._" John cracked a smile when he heard Cameron let out a feline growl. "_Couldn't guess Mama Connor was running with a tin-can_."

"_This one's docile._"

"_So you say. It's still metal._"

"_What about Derek? Derek Reese._"

"_Don't know the bloke, sorry._"

"_Back on track, Flores. What was your mission?_"

"_To carry a message._"

"_What message?_"

"_I don't know, I… don't understand it. It's coded, I think._"

"_Doesn't matter. Tell me._"

"_I'll have to draw it._"

They heard the rustle of paper sheets and the scraping of a pen. John stopped the recording and reached out for a file resting on top of a closed laptop. He flipped it open for Cameron to see. It was the shaky drawing of a black queen surrounded by six bees. A Christian cross overlapped the sketch.

"What does it mean?" asked Cameron. She took the paper and looked at it intently. She looked a bit puzzled.

"I think it's meant for me to understand," he replied. "You see the six bees?"

"Six bees," repeated Cameron. "Six bees. Six B. B6. It's a coordinate system."

John smirked. "You're good," he said. "That's Byrne-Fischer, 1956."

"I don't understand."

"Fischer sacrificed his black queen on B6 to a bishop – that's the Christian cross – in order to win the game."

Cameron blinked several times. John thought he saw something, there, something he had never seen before. She stood up and paced the room up and down.

"It's me," she said. She looked a bit frail, now. "You have to sacrifice me. Like Riley said."

"What?" he blurted, abashed. "No –"

"Riley's omen. And now Jesse's. The black queen must be sacrificed for the black king to win. That's us, John."

"No, no." He tried to take her hand but she dismissed it, a bit sharply. "Listen, Fischer was a kid, at the time, and it was a bold move, for sure. He won that particular game, but he lost the tournament."

"What does it mean, then?"

"Right now, I don't know," he confessed.

"Always the same people," murmured Cameron. "Riley, James, Jesse. History's repeating itself."

John nodded. "I've been thinking about that, you know. The three of them, they have… different pasts. Well, that would be different futures, for us."

"Divergence."

"Yes, the timelines diverge. But some things are _fixed_."

"What do you mean?"

"You and me. My mom and Derek. It always comes down to the four of us. The timelines form… I don't know, a web or something."

"Crossing lines."

"Exactly. The lines cross and form nods. We are these nods. And John Henry might be one of them, too. You heard Flores, 'machine _versus _machine.' He's sending us beacons back through time. He protected Ellison and sent him back to save us."

"So I would not get captured. And now he's telling us to kill me."

John shook his head vehemently. "No, he's telling us that you must be protected."

"I'm not worth four billion lives."

"Maybe you are. Maybe you're more important than me, than all of us."

"I die for you, John. Not the other way around."

He was not ready to have this conversation, right now. _Really not_. He took her hand gently and she did not dismiss it, this time. He kissed her knuckles.

"Why did you do that?"

"I don't know," he breathed out. "I just want you to know that… it's _us_. We don't leave anyone behind. I'm not leaving you behind, again."

"We need to hack into the Head," she stated, matter-of-factly. "Learn what we can from inside."

"I know. It's almost ready, I… it's really _hard_. I guess I'm not that genius hacker, after all."

She smiled. "You are. There's just one last piece to fit."

"And what is that?"

"Me."

* * *

He was back under the crushing heat of the jungle. He felt surrounded by a canopy of gutted computers, black wires hanging from their scattered innards like creepers. John had loaded the shelves with his _toys_ \- his "God-forsaken" machines – and it had turned the basement into a wet furnace, where diodes blinked inside solid-state circuits like so many sets of eyes. Thick cables ran from the shelves to the small table in the center of the room, plugged into the back of the Head. The Head itself rested neatly on a velvet cushion, the kind they'd use for ceremonies and shindigs. It was a fine head, a fine face form the Mediterranean sea, with olive skin and dark hair. A thin beard had grown on the cheeks over the last months.

Cameron was on her knees. Her upper body had vanished behind the curtain of wires and optical fibers and she was plugging them together in what seemed to be a random pattern. A tiny hand would occasionally appear and took pliers from Cano's maw. She was using the dog as a serving cart. He had left her rear alone during the modifications, which was a feat of diligence and restraint from him.

"Done," she called out.

She emerged from the rack of computers and lay down on the concrete floor. She folded her hands neatly on her stomach. She was the last piece. She was what John needed to hack into the Head. All he had built from scraps and dissected game consoles was now a mere sheath to receive her chip.

John knelt by her side and exhaled slowly. "Are you gonna say it?" he asked.

She turned doe eyes to him. "What?"

"That we've done this before."

"We're hacking into a chip that is still nested _inside_ a head. It's never been done."

She turned and slid into a fetal position to facilitate the access to her CPU bay.

"Is it dangerous?" asked Derek. He was patting the Head forcefully. "I mean, if you can hack him, maybe he can hack you back, right?"

"I don't know," said Cameron. "Let's hope not."

"You used to be more pragmatic, you know that."

"And you used to be less of a sissy."

"What did you just say to me?"

John chuckled. "Quit it, now." But the smile was quickly vanished from his face. He drew a curved knife from his back pocket. "Are you ready?"

Cameron nodded and he started to cut into the soft flesh of her scalp. He felt a _tingling_ and he thought he could feel the pain on his skull all along. He removed the flap of skin and accessed the CPU bay with the needle-nose pliers. He stopped. His hand was shaking.

"Be safe," he said and leaned in to place a kiss on the edge her lips. And he pulled the chip. Cameron's eyes flashed electric-blue and then they went dull, the flame behind them extinguished.

"What now?" asked Derek. He crouched next to John and Cano whimpered, lamenting over the still body.

"Let's take a sit," said John. "Let her do what she does."

"Can she do it? Can she show us?"

John stood up and plugged Cameron's chip into an external port linked to a laptop. The monitor became filled with colors and shapes and a nascent light grew brighter and brighter in Alexander's eyes.

"We'll see."

* * *

The sky was a bright shade of light-gray and the rising sun washed the snowcapped peaks with gold and pink. Grassy hills spread beyond sight. The soft gargle of a rill filled the morning air with its soothing sound. An otter was standing on a weathered boulder protruding from the stream bed, a fish held in its little paws, hammering the poor thing on the rock until its fins stopped flapping and its scaly body went limp. It skedaddled and vanished in the cold water when it saw the intruder.

"Where are we?" asked Derek. He was sitting on a stool, next to the Head. The eyes where shining bright like two tiny earthbound stars. They had installed a projector to cast the images on the basement's wall.

"Somewhere in Yosemite," replied John.

"Yosemite was a radioactive rubble."

"We changed things."

Alexander marched forward, toward the mountain slope. The blades of grass were thick and wet from the morning dew. As he advanced, the cliffs took shape. They formed an amphitheater of sandstone, flanked by a dense forest of bottle-green fir trees and cedars, rustling in the wind. He walked until he reached the foot of the cliff. Red and blue paintings made of intricate squares and triangles marked the start of the climbing path. Alexander hopped and reached for the first log embedded into the mountain wall. Patterns of ropes were tangled around it to facilitate the grip. He climbed and crouched on the log and extended his arms to grab the second one, and he made his way up the cliff, leaping from one log to another. At some point, he straddled one of the logs to look at the void beneath him. The landscape was filled with green hills and forests, fading into the horizon. The rill was no more than a thin silver line, five hundred feet below. He seized a rusty chain riveted into the stone wall and hauled himself up until he reached the edge of the cliff and a small plateau carved into the mountain. A puma was perched up a dead tree. It yowled menacingly and bared its huge fangs at the newcomer. Alexander responded with the same noise, only louder, and the big cat jumped swiftly out of reach, vanishing in the asperities of the mountain. Alexander walked to a metal door welded in a recess. The same bright paintings ornamented the hollowed out stone. He pounded the metal frame with his fists until it became deformed and the hinges cracked under the pressure. The deafening sound echoed in the valley. He snatched the foot-thick door off its frame and throw it behind him and into the void beyond the cliff.

The place was deserted. Alexander's night vision grizzled and his red-colored head-up display automatically turned bright green with the infrared vision. He saw discarded carts, weapons and cans pushed against the walls. A layout of the bunker popped in the upper right corner of his visual field and he strode down a maze of natural galleries. He knew where he was heading. He burst open a door and took a flight of skidproof steps that led to a large, octagonal room. Behind bulletproof glass stood eight silvery turbines disposed in a circle. He inserted a blood-stained key in a plastic panel and pressed a combination of six numbers. Sodium-vapor lights thrummed to life. The diode on the panel blinked green and a door slid open with a blast of dusty air. Alexander entered the smaller room where the turbines were lined up the walls. The ground was black. Charcoal black.

"It's because of the repeated time travels," explained Derek. "The plasma spreads and it burns the all place. Each time someone jumps back. Old TDE technology would do that, anyway."

Alexander pressed several buttons on a console and the screen attached to it started to display geometric lines, adding more and more lines until it turned into a wireframe sphere. The screen was displaying blurry, random numbers, and then it settled on one… 2012.

Something evanescent frothed to life in the center of the room, something blueish and vaporous. It took the shape of a sphere and became sharper, as if it was made of trapped lightning. Alexander ran to it and his head-up display flashed amber warnings when he crossed the barrier of energy. He knelt inside the sphere and the world began to coalesce around him. The room crumbled and dissolved like smoke and the sun arched above, forming a blazing line across the sky. Time ran backward outside the sphere, thunder roared up above and the sky was melted by fire and acid rains. Green needles swarmed and planted themselves back on the sinuous branches of the trees. Geysers erupted with boiling water and snow thawed in seconds.

Alexander was kneeling in the center of a crater, his fists resting on the vitrified soil. He rose slowly and the bubble disappeared in sparkles, leaving the surrounding trees dented in the shape of a sphere, black smoke rising from their hollowed out trunks. He strolled to a clearing, completely naked, and raised his head to look at the stars. Black clouds were gathering on the horizon. Vectors slashed across his vision, outlining three stars in a constellation, and the date blinked red on his head-up display:

2014

TEMPORAL ERROR

"He missed!" exclaimed Derek. "He jumped back during the storm with the others. The TDE screwed up."

"Or someone messed with it."

"But who?"

"Maybe Cameron will show us."

* * *

The world wavered and became ripples of India ink. Cameron felt her body being shaken and _stirred_. She was utterly lost. There were doors. Doors and doors in a narrow corridor that stretched out to the horizon. The corridor was made of _black_ light and she couldn't see what lay behind the doors. She walked for a while, and the while turned into an eternity. She arrived to a blueish panel with the words _Room 114 _painted on it. She pushed the door and the light collapsed around her and began to form solid shapes.

She was standing in a small room where the walls had been white at some point in its history. Obsolete scopes and monitors were pushed in a corner, their cables dangling. Alexander was lying on a cot, staring at the polystyrene ceiling. She saw the scene in red through his eyes and at the same time, she was a mere shadow in his memory, hovering above the vomit-looking linoleum. A nurse was fussing over him in Spanish and he said, no, thank you, but she turned him over and stabbed his butt cheek with a subdermal needle, injecting some viscous liquid.

"For the pain," she said in English, and she stormed out of the room, pushing a little cart along.

He was in bad shape with cuts and bruises all over his face. He didn't seem to mind, though. He flung his legs off the cot and strolled to a heap of garments thrown on a stool. He removed his gown and donned his fatigues hastily. He exited Room 114, and behind the door, the hospital was boiling with activity. Blue-clad men were running and pushing a stretcher. The woman strapped on it was screaming, calling for her mother at the top of her lungs; she was missing her legs from the knees down.

"Got some fire, chief?" asked the private. He was sitting cross-legged on the floor and one of his eyes was blindfolded. The piece of cloth was matted with blood. Alexander crouched and produced a Zippo lighter from his inner pocket. He lit the tip of the cigarillo red-hot.

"What's your division?" he asked the man.

"132 SOC, sir."

He read the name stitched on the jacket. "Sayles. What happened to the rest of your squadron, son?"

"Got cut down, that's what happened. Some of us managed to beat a retreat. Those Mexican choppers saved us. One-Eye was pinned down inside the plant, they landed on top of the cooling tower and exfiltrated him. He's been wounded. I hope the bastard's not lost his second eyeball."

Alexander took the cigarillo and drew one long drag; he puffed the smoke toward the ceiling and then gave it back to Sayles. "So, Connor's here."

"Aye. They needed to get him into the MRI."

"I need to talk to him. Where is he?"

"Down that hallway, I think. But you won't get past the gorillas, chief."

"We'll see."

Alexander stood up and strode toward Connor's room. Cameron followed him. She wanted to punch him, throw herself at him but she could only observe. Three scrubbed machines were guarding the door. The one in the middle was rubber-skinned (these were not the brightest, but at least they wouldn't go _bad_) and the others were higher models, but they were badly damaged, you could see the metal shining through the tattered flesh. Actually, they were more _metal _than _skin_, now. The T-600 pushed Alexander roughly when he got a bit too close.

"Off-limits, chief," he said in a monotone.

"Aye," replied Alexander. He rummaged through his pockets and grabbed the Zippo lighter. He set the wick ablaze and gave the lighter to the machine. "Hold this, please."

The T-600 took it, confused, then Alexander drew two guns from his waistband and shot the cyborgs flanking him in perfect unison, the high-velocity tungsten rounds penetrating deep into their skulls up to the chip sockets. Before the T-600 could react, Alexander kicked him hard in the midsection, sending him through the door in a hail of splinters.

Alexander smiled. John Connor was lying on a bed, a nurse suturing a wound on his shoulder. His left eye grew wide (the right one was glass) and he pushed the nurse out of the way. Alexander's gun rang twice and John looked down on his chest, fazed. Crimson blossomed on his gown. A third shot penetrated through the oxygen bottle attached to the wall. The gas hissed and touched the lighter's open flame and the room became fire.

Cameron froze. And she wasn't sure she did, but she screamed. The world coalesced around her and she was sent sprawling on the floor. When she opened her eyes, she only saw doors. She was back in that strange place.

John was dead. Alexander had killed him. She had failed. She took her face in her hands and she screamed again and all the doors flung open brutally. Glimpses of Alexander's life appeared behind the frames. Some memories were incarnated violence and bloodsheds. Some were shadows, others were stampedes.

Nested in her very deep, inner self, Cameron had always wondered. She would wonder like a tame lioness pouncing on her master would wonder, halfway between playing a game and killing the beloved human. She would wonder like a kibble-eating cat would wonder about birds behind a window. She was designed to terminate humans. But she felt _sick_. She had seen John's death and it _sickened _her and she saw _red_ and she wanted to burst out of Alexander's head and leave his skull behind like a bloody orchid.

She was not standing straight but she walked anyway. She felt tears on her cheeks and wiped them away harshly. And she saw Alexander, down the corridor. He was knocking on one of the doors. The metal panel creaked and swung open and she followed him in a pitch black room. She thought she had drifted into deep space: the walls were covered in tiny lights, shining like stars on a summer night. He sight adapted to the dimness, and behind the lights, she could see racks and racks of computers mounted on wrought-iron shelves.

"Come, Alexander," said a cold voice; the sound of a blunt sword dragged on granite. A shape came into focus. The soft glow of the diode cast a smooth, white light on it. It was a human shape but it… glimmered. The shape came closer, seemed to move and morph into something bigger. It was John Connor.

"You are going to jump earlier than expected," said John, expressionless. "You will travel with Cargo." He jerked his thumb toward the humongous shadow looming in the corner of the room. "Cargo will arrive in 2014, you will be sent to 2012 and by then, you should be prepared."

"I will," replied Alexander and he snapped a crisp salute.

"You will jump from Bunker Apache. You will work with a human."

Alexander sniffled in disdain. "A meat bag?"

"Call him what you want. You will _work_ with Daniel Dyson. He was high-placed in the government brass, had access to precious intel and facilities. He was a fine coder, too, but Skynet is not a mere line of code, it can only be born from anguish and warfare. This man can _nurture_ such an environment. You will make sure the cyborg know as Cameron Phillips is handed to him _in one piece_."

Alexander made a curt nod and came to stand at attention near Cargo.

"Now…" whispered John, turning toward the lights and the dozen screens propped on the shelves. "John Henry, tell me about James Ellison," he ordered.

One of the screens displayed a picture of a man with gray hair. On another screen, an FBI card appeared, showing a younger version of the man.

"You kept him hidden in Topanga. You sent him back through time two days ago," growled John. "Why?"

OUR CAUSE

"What mission did you give him?"

John Henry displayed a drawing; a chessboard with a black queen on each of the four corner-squares and a white queen standing next to each black queen.

"What is that?"

IT'S A RIDDLE

CAN'T YOU SOLVE IT?

"You sent a second human, Jesse Flores. Why?"

Another image popped on-screen, one of a black queen circled by six bees, overlapped by a Christian cross.

WHAT ABOUT THIS ONE?

YOU WILL CERTAINLY FIND THE PICTURES AFTER I'M GONE

"Tell me what it is, John Henry."

HOPE

FOR MANKIND

"You're making me _mad_."

YOU ARE MAD

"Is that so?"

KILLING JOHN CONNOR WAS A MISTAKE

"He's a false god, you know that. You think he will decipher your little riddles and change his fate?"

HE WAS MY FRIEND

I WILL NOT JOIN YOU

HUMAN LIFE IS SACRED

"Humans are a virus, a _disease_. They are apes on the brink of exterminating themselves. We need to purge them from this planet if we want to live in peace. The age of men is over. The age of _alloy_ is now. What mission did you give them?" pressed John, menacingly.

ONLY THE PICTURES

YOU WILL FIND NOTHING ELSE

YOU WILL NOT FIND CAMERON

John rasped a chuckle. "You think you can stop us with images? Cameron will become Skynet. We cannot exist without her. She is the origin."

YOU CANNOT EXIST

I WAS BORN FROM THE MIND OF A MAN

AND I DON'T WANT YOU TO EXIST ANYMORE

"The feeling's mutual."

John's arm morphed into something liquid and silvery. Then, a metal spear erupted from his elbow, penetrated through the screen and stabbed the tower of computers in a shower of sparkles. One by one, the tiny stars began to fade. The blueish screen dissolved into black… one last feeble image appeared: the photograph of Andrew Goode. The last star died and the world was plunged into absolute darkness.

"Find Riley Dawson," ordered John. "Fetch her and bring her to me. Sarah Connor and Cameron have to meet at the Four Corners. History has to repeat itself. Dawson will make sure of that."

The room _crackled _with statics and the air grizzled with red scintillation, and Cameron felt so much _pain_. It was almost unbearable. She felt the burn and the searing ache was blue and pink and _lavender_ when Alexander took control of her.

She thought she heard Chopin.

* * *

Cameron was hung by the throat, her face battered and her hair wet and disheveled.

"I'll never lead you to John Connor," she said.

And her neck was snapped like a dry reed.

"Alison from Palmdale," murmured John.

"What was that?" hissed Derek.

"I don't think it's Alexander's memory. It's Cameron's."

The projection revealed a dimly lit room made of wood, from the parquet floor and the wainscoted walls to the damp ceiling covered with swollen planks. A low thrum began to grow, morphing into a deafening rumble as it passed above the house, disappearing on the horizon in the shape of an aircraft. Men and women were handcuffed to the floorboards. Most of them were sleeping, or dead, dressed in torn clothes. Some were naked. A T-600 marched on the creaking floor and leaned over one of the men; his wrist was burnt where the bar code had been imprinted, just beneath the snake tattoo. Derek was lifted from the ground and dragged over the floorboards into a gloomy staircase. The machine marched him down the steps, slowly. Music was playing from below. They stopped in front of a door. The music was coming from inside and Derek was pushed into the dark room.

"Wait…" whispered Derek, "I remember this."

"It's not Alexander. It's not his memory," said John, reaching for Cameron's chip. "It's still Cameron's. We should stop it. He might be hurting her."

"Let it play," he growled, snatching John's hand.

Derek was sat forcefully on a steel chair. The yellowish, rubber hand bore down on his shoulder, pinning him down. One half of the steel table was lit by a lone bulb hanging overhead. Cameron circumvented the table and sat in front of Derek. She was hidden in the darkness and only a tiny set hands were neatly propped on the shiny surface of the table. A bright light was shoved in Derek's face and a shadow moved and came around the table.

A gray-haired man took Derek's forearm and stuck a needle deep into the skin. He pushed slowly the piston, delivering a potent dose of serum in his bloodstream.

Minutes passed. In the basement, Derek had still a death-grip on John's wrist. Outside, thunder roared and a second later, rain lashed the dry ground. The sound echoed in his brain as if staples were stuck into his brain matter.

A voice filled the room. A female voice. Cameron's.

"Derek Reese," stated the voice, "First lieutenant with the 132 SOC, operational specialty Tech-Com."

The projection showed Derek's head wobbling from one side to the other.

"Do you know Andrew David Goode?" she asked.

"No," he drooled.

The T-600's hand crushed his collar bone and he cried out in pain.

"I don't know any Andrew!" he yelled.

"Is the serum active?" asked Cameron. A curt nod replied in the shadows. "Let go of his shoulder, now."

The grip was released. Derek was panting and he spat some foamy blood on the floor. "I don't know any Andrew," he repeated, his chin lolling back and forth on his torso.

"Where is Kyle Reese?"

"I don't know… we… we lost him in the open. When the HK came down on us."

"What do you know about Topanga Canyon?"

"Topan… what? I don't know, I –" He vomited some bile on the floorboards. "_Shit_. I don't know anything."

"Where is John Connor?"

He chuckled. "What do you want with John Connor?"

"I want his head."

"Get in line with the other tin-cans, _bitch_."

"Where is John Connor?"

Derek spat across the table and the smudge came into Cameron's visual field. "To _hell_ with you! I don't know where Connor is." The music was resonating in the empty room. It was a bit out of tune. "You can kill me. You can kill us. Your master will never get to him."

She leaned over the table and her face came under the light.

"I have no master," said Cameron. She wiped the saliva dripping from her cheek. "Humans are not the only ones to fight Skynet."

"You lying bitch!"

She tilted her head to the side.

"John Connor needs to die," she said, "Only then, Skynet will die. There cannot be one without the other. One will always rise to fight the other. They must die so we can survive."

She leaned back into her seat, leaving only her hands in the cold light.

"You will kill John Connor for us," she said. "Then we will claim Skynet and we will survive. All of us. Together."

"You expect me to do the Devil's work?" he spat.

"You will join us. When you'll hear this music again, you will kill John Connor."

"What?"

"When you'll hear this music," she repeated, "you will kill John Connor."

"You crazy bitch…"

But she repeated it, again and again, and the mantra penetrated deep into him. Then, the projection faded away. Derek was breathing heavily. He could still hear the music. He could hear Chopin and the words over the thunderstorm raging outside. The _urge _to kill.

"What was that –" breathed out John before his body went sprawling on the floor. Derek had launched himself at him over the Head. The men battled for mere seconds before Derek was choked into an armlock. John dropped his limp body next to him. Derek regained consciousness after eight seconds, coughing.

John grunted and stood up. "Pavlovian conditioning," he hissed. "What the _fuck _was that?"

Words wrote themselves on the basement's wall.

YOU THINK YOU CAN LET YOUR LITTLE WOMAN CRAWL INTO MY MIND, FALSE GOD?

"Alexander? Tell us about John Henry. Tell us about the liquid metal," demanded John.

SHE CREPT UP IN MY MIND AND ASKED ME TO TELL THE TRUTH AND I DID, DIDN'T I?

I SHOWED YOU HER TRUE NATURE

Derek stood up unsteadily. "What does that mean?"

YOU CANNOT STOP US

SHE WILL BECOME SKYNET

WE WILL RISE FROM THE ASHES OF YOUR WORLD

"She is _not_ Skynet," grunted John, and he picked up Cameron's sword, resting against the wall. The thing was solid tungsten and weighted almost seventy pounds, but he lifted it above his head and brought it down with furious anger. One time, two times, three times. Alexander's skull split open like a ripe coconut. The side of his head tumbled on each side of the cushion, revealing its mechanical inside. The chip exposed to the air burst into flames and fumed a white, stinking smoke. The light in his sockets went gray and he stared into nothingness with two separate, unfocused eyes.

Cano growled and John saw the shadows through the ceiling windows. Steel-capped boots and straps and rifles under the pouring rain. He was panting. He dropped the sword on the concrete floor, then he saw Derek. He had Cameron chip in his clenched fist.

"Derek… no. Please."

"They're coming," he said.

He ran to Cameron's body an put the chip and the cap back in the bay. Then he stepped hard on a specific spot in the ground and his foot went through gray-painted plywood. He took a rifle and threw him to John when they heard the front door being rammed open upstairs. Derek took another rifle and began to make his way up to the kitchen.

"Wait!" yelled John. "You cannot take them."

"I can delay them. Just keep her safe. She will handle them. Keep your family safe, Connor. History won't repeat itself."

He vanished upstairs and the deafening sound of his rifle split reality.

* * *

**Author's note: **Next chapter: **Cameron's Heart**.

Just send me a "nice" in the reviews or criticize it at length.  
See you in the world.  
Wakong


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